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."

Comments

Should be called: The VaporWare Convention

[strictnein]

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.

Re:Should be called: The VaporWare Convention

[Neil Blender]

The Vaporware Convention takes place every year, but it never happens.

Flying cars, yippie

[aardwolf204]

In one vision of the future, the world will have flying cars, coats that make people "transparent,'' digital cameras that translate foreign signs and robots that can attend classes for sick children.

The exhibits include the Moller Skycar, a four-passenger vehicle from Moller International of Davis. The Jetsons-style craft is small enough to drive on the ground, but can take off vertically and fly as fast as 380 mph

They're still promising me the flying car, spiffy.

This thing is actually pretty cool:

http://www.moller.com/
the M400 Skycar can cruise comfortably at 350+ MPH and achieve up to 28 miles per gallon. Awesome.
http://www.moller.com/skycar/

On the transparent cloak...

[Conesus]

That transparent cloak is not just for wearing!

The inventor, Professor Susumu Tachi from Tokyo University, believes that it has practical applications that range from surgery, where the surgeon could be wearing this cloak on his hands to be able to 'see through them', to pilots who wish to be able to see the ground underneath the cockpit, for when they are landing.

Really, the possibilities are endless. Military, Medical, Transportation, Commericial products.

Hell, even the napkin holder could use this, so you can have a huge frivolous artsy napkin holder in the center of the table (or a center-piece, something along those lines), and be able to talk to the other person across the table as if nothing were there.

Of course the technology has to improve until the applications become a reality, but just think what this could enable us to do!

Conesus.

It will be awful

[Tarantolato]

First of all, the site has a Flash intro that's more epilepsy-inducing than the latest Japanese cartoon craze.

Second of all, it's sponsored by Wired. I remember picking up one of the early issues and there was all this stuff about VR. If this were the early 90's, VR would be all over NextFest or whatever it's called.

Anyways, it sounded like a cool idea and all until the inventor dude talked about the actual applications. He had had a party the last night, and everyone had to pretend they were lobsters. They wore the low-res headsets and had to use the special gloves to make pincer movements with their hands.

It was then that I concluded that VR wasn't what it promised to be. Also that Wired was basically a newer Omni, but without the virtue of being published by a pr0n baron.

Re:Contradiction?

[Carnildo]

Oh, also, Isn't retro-reflective redundant? Doesn't reflection pretty much imply sending light back in the direction it came?

No. Classic reflection (the sort normal mirrors do) involves light heading off in a direction other than the one it was originally going in -- "angle of incidence equals angle of reflection". Retroreflection involves things like corner mirrors and sends light back in a direction exactly opposite the one it was originally headed in.