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NextFest
anzha writes "This Saturday and Sunday between 9 and 6 pm at the Fort Mason Center's Festival Pavilion in San Francisco, NextFest will be taking place. Organized by Wired and sponsored by HP, The SF Chronicle, General Electric, General Motors, and many others, this is an expo on 'almost there' technologies. Ranging from [in]famous Moller aircar to a 'transparent cloak' from the Tachi Lab at Tokyo University to antibacterial powders from Canada to many, many others. Read more here."
This is what's next?
I guess, if the nextfest.net website is anything to go by, that in the future all websites will be based solely on ultra-annoying Macromedia Flash! A page focused on this type of event should be slim and trim and have a large section devoted to easily viewable/editable/blownupable (to make bigger) pictures of every single device at this convention. Or at least has a large chunk of the site like that.
Casual Games/Downloads
The raincoat-like cloak is made out of "retro-reflective'' material covered with tiny beads that reflect light back in the same direction it came.
The cloak is designed to make whatever it is covering, a body or object, appear transparent by projecting video shot with a camera from behind the cloak onto the front of the cloak.
Hold on a sec, these are two very different things. Are they talking about two different cloaks? If so, it's not very obvious from the article. Also, wouldn't the first cloak be a mirror, as opposed to transparent?
Ansi's and stupid tricks!
They're trying to make it a future-tech world's fair event, but looking at the event website, it looks more like demos and marketing. Although it does look really cool, it's not cool enough for me to pay to see their advertisements!
Sorry, but I'm not paying $15/person/day (even if there's really only one day's worth of stuff according to the schedule), to see a bunch of companies throw their future-tech marketing at me. It doesn't seem that cool (and yes, I live in the area, so I could go, and I'm employed, so I could afford to go).
But then, maybe I'm just in a bad mood.
Meow. Now!
To all of the posters that are critisizing the expo as a vapor-fest, I say to you, why not let your imagination run wild? Decades ago we had Worlds Fair and the famous Futurama in New York. People were left in awe of possible future technologies that improve quality of life. People came back wide eyed and filled with imagination. The closest thing I experienced to something like this today was a showcase at Disney Expo 12 years ago when I was 10... It had on display futuristic cars and possible technologies that openned my youthful imagination. It made a big impact on me and got me interested in technology. I hear people complain about the lack of innovation today and I'm personally disappointed at the lack of creativity in a lot of industries. In the 40s and 50s people got to see glimpses of the future presented by GE and Ford where everything is automated. People were happy and it gave them something worthwhile to look forward to. It gave us faith in technology. We have nothing like this today. I for one welcome conventions that inspire us, especially at a time when the future looks so bleak. Sure, it's funded by big corporations but so were the World Fairs in the past and they turned out great!
What's worse, is that there are still people who haven't heard of this thing, and learned long ago that it's all hot air. For goodness' sake, I read about these when I was 10. I'm 24 now. I gave up hope in these things years ago, and so should all of you.
You probably shouldn't click this.
> I think you mean "an ultra annoying use of Macromedia Flash."
Unlike, for instance, Homestar Runner.
... not unless they want to carry projectors in front of themselves, and know that their enemies are going to be in one specific direction, and don't mind low quality images... (etc)
"She was out of her depth in a shallow pool." -- Peggy Noonan on Sarah Palin
Yeah ok Moller has been promising the moon for ages and hasn't delivered yet. But at least he's Doing Something (TM). You can see prototypes, I've seen the video of the tethered flight. How many of you people bitching about his lack of progress have a flying car doing test flights in your back yard? Anyone? Until someone else shows me at least the same amount of progress he has you can shut up.
As for the transparent cloak... it's spiffy yes. All you need is a visible camera behind you and a visible projector in front of you and you can be invisible to people who can't spot cameras or projectors and come at you from one direction. Yay.
You know what I want to see? I want to see a PDA that doesn't suck i.e. lack a HD, or wireles connection, or ability to run mainstream software. I want to see an OS that can be both stable and play the latest games without screwing around with drivers and compiling shit all day or getting "Well it plays MOST games under emulation, except the ones YOU want." I want to see a broadband connection at a reasonable price that doesn't have shitty upstream or fulltime forced NAT or get capped as soon as you actually use the damn thing. Why doesn't anyone invent any of that stuff?
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!