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NextFest 2005
Adnan Akbari writes "NextFest 2005 is this weekend in Chicago, IL. Efficient transportation, Home Automation, and advances in the medical were all big themes. Everything from a shoe that graphs your physical fitness to bionic arms were displayed. A summary of all displays along with images are at QuenteCafe.com"
Could this open some eyes and increase interest in alternative (Linux, Mac) offerings?
to the phrase "knock boots"....
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
at first I thought it was just going to be a huge ad for GE- all you see are GE displays at first and then the farther you get in, the more of an organic, research oriented feel takes over the rest of the place. NASA has some really cool stuff on display. the gaming area was awesome and irobot had a packbot there.
lot's of robots.
I found the most interesting stuff to be in the medical and military fields. definitely go if you're anywhere near chicago. It's an easy show to spend the entire day at.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
This show was not worth the money. There was very few new things there. If you have Discovery and History channel you have seen almost everything there!
The show was laid out pretty horrible too. Hard to move around to see the displays. Some of the Displays had Audio and Video but you couldn't hear it because of some horrible music in the back gound.
They also had signs up to read but they were so small you couldn't read them with out blocking everyones views.
This show was a crappy scam for your $15.
Everything from a shoe that graphs your physical fitness...
/. readers?
Why do I have a feeling this shoe won't be so popular with my fellow
the shoe phone. And the umbrella of silence. We were promised shoe phones and umbrellas of silence.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I remember Nextfest 2004 in San Fran last year and it's major disappointment... the invisibility cloak. Man o man everybody wanted to see that thing... but it could only be viewed from ONE SPOT because it was using a projector and a videocamera!
Doh!
I think the future is going to demand more inventiveness than what I see there. A Skycar is efficient transportation? A Hydrogen powered Hummer is efficient transportation?
Some of these things may sound fun, but unless some basic thinking starts to change I think what we're actually going to need is a farm that picks up and moves as climate change happens, artificial noses to breathe oxygen depleted air and so forth.
yeah, they have it there this year also. I didn't even bother looking- it just looked stupid.
here- put on this blindfold and you won't be able to see me anymore. not really rocket science.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Where is the implant that allows you to use excess fat to support the server's bandwidth.. that would probably be just as useful as any of the devices shown. Mirrors please?
When I saw the headline, I was expecting a bunch of crochety old geeks having a big LAN party with their black magnesium cube workstations....
o/~ Join us now and share the software
"A summary of all displays along with images are at QuenteCafe.com"
You mean, Was available...
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If you're in the city, even getting to where you need to go is a hassle. I wouldn't wish the commute around this time of year on anyone - it's horrible. Couple that with the weather and you're looking at one hot crowded journey no matter where you go.
After seeing some of the less than enthusiastic comments about NextFest, it doesn't sound like the effort in getting to it would really pay off. There are other places to go to in the city all year round to get your geek fix anyways.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!!!!
Overall NextFest was cool. My only problem with it was that it got frustrating not knowing at what stage of development many exhibits were.
For instance: my favorite exhibit, the hydrogen cars with replaceable bodies over a universal chassis, didn't mention if these cars were functional, and if so to what degree. I feel like if they're just showing off a plastic model and an idea they should have made it more clear.
I saw everything at NeXTFest, and sadly didn't see too many things I hadn't seen before. One thing in particular that was bizzare was the number of "interactive video displays" that featured:
A video camera.
Processing that camera to derive a one-bit image.
Edge-detecting that one-bit image to interact with graphical elements.
Keying the original video over the graphics.
At the risk of sounding like a crank...we were doing this stuff on Amigas back in the late 80s! There was a program called "Mandela" which was specifically designed to produce interactive video displays. And frankly, some of the demos that shipped with that program were cooler than the ones at NextFest.
Seriously, I'm not an Amiga crank...I have some of the old machines, but haven't fired them up in several years. I just am annoyed that there has been little to no evolution in this area in nearly 20 frickin YEARS!
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
My wife and I went, and were quite disappointed, even though both of us fall squarely into the "geek" crowd. Most of it was "Look at all the cool stuff you can't afford to buy from <CORP>!" or pushing hybrid Hummers, or tech stuff we'd heard about a long time ago. After about 90 minutes, we'd seen everything we wanted to see, and the crowds had descended (we got there early). The floor layout is poor, and there were several "choke points" that were real traffic jams. I also noticed that an hour after we got there, several exhibits had stopped working, and people were frantically trying to fix things. We got free tickets from a GM-sponsored talk a few days ago (which was also a waste of time), and I'm glad that we didn't have to actually pay admission.
There was a display for several NASA projects (Cassini, the Mars rovers, solar sails, et al), and that was very good--the NASA guys know their stuff. There was a cool vaccuum too.
I'd also like to give special mention about the rude guy at the MIT Media Lab exhibit. The conversation was along the lines of:
Me: This is interesting, how does it work?Him: It's complicated, and I don't want to explain it.
Great attitude for a trade show...
I think I'll pass next time NextFest comes around.
Something about expecting flying cars would be in order, I think. Perhaps a beowulf cluster of flying cars. With Microsoft Flying Car 2010 crashing during demonstration, killing Bill Gates.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
http://www.nextfest.net/
- Just because we CAN do a thing, does not mean we SHOULD do that thing.
While the link to QuenteCafe is nice and all, it by no means includes summaries of all of the displays. It would be nice to see a site that did, though.
...for a book to be published in 40 or 50 years similar to the 1980's "Whatever Happened to the Future". In that 80s book, they asked the question like:
1. Where's my flying car that was mentioned in Popular Science in the 1950s?
2.How come I don't have a four day workweek now like some science and technology magazines predicted in the 40s and 50s?
3. How come our city streets aren't air conditioned and climate controlled as we were promised in the 50s?
4. Where are the family cars that drive themselves while we play Parchisi in the back?
I just got the latest issue of Wired (one of the shittiest magazines known to man) and they had a special advert insert that shows off what they plan to showcase at Nextfest. All I can say is that this is not for technologist, but for gadget guys. There is a huge difference between the two even though the popular press attempts to equate them. Gadget guys are the first on the block to have the latest technology... even if they don't need it, use it, or understand it. Technologists usually have the technology before the gadget guys, but only because they built it themselves. The main difference between what the gadget guys have and what the technologists have is stylishness and status symbol value. The gadget guys will probably have the nicer looking device with far more status symbol value and a higher pricetag, but not significantly different from what the technologist built or hacked.
As a side note, when I was looking at Wired last night (before I gave it to my kid to tear up at play time) I wondered, "Is there an asshole out there who lives by this magazine an buys ever gadget featured"? It was a chilling thought. Nobody could possily be that stupid. Could they? Imagine living in a house that looked like everything came from Sharper Image. Brrrrr... terrifying.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I am here at WIRED, I am finishing up in the press room right now. They are kicking me out. Check out my NEXTFEST LED blog. Also, not to try and promote registration, but if you at least register I will email when I post my 10 min video exclusive interview (to be released July 1st) with the Drew Shutte, the Publisher of WIRED. No promises, but you should be able to stream it.
http://www.ledmonthly.com/
I spent yesterday at NextFest and had really interesting conversations with the scientists and engineers behind the technologies. Whereas most trade shows have marketing-folk, NextFest had the "real deal" folks there. Conversing with them about their projects was quite easy:
Example interesting conversations:
* Electrical Engineers from Sweden working on innovative devices for monitoring power use
* Doctoral CS candidates preseting their thesis projects.
* Art/Design professors from Tokyo and Vienna working on multimedia/communication projects synthesizing technology with
* Undergrads from Dublin working on a video game (controlled by breath) which they found equally popular with boys and girls.
* The Mars Rover programmers were there. (I didn't get a chance to talk w/ them, however, but could have).
* The La Vida Robot guys and their teacher (who bested MIT in the underwater bot contest).
There was a creepy sense of mercantilism infused in the event. Several corporations sponsored displays and there was no real local connection to anything. Although some of the presenters were from universities in Chicago, I expected to see some local mad scientists with cool stuff on card tables. I guess Wired magazine, being from the Left Coast, thinks of Chicago as a technological back-water. Here to edu-ma-cate us Midwest yokels.
Speaking of presenters, there were honest-to-goodness researchers and scientists at the booths. Yes, there were marketroids and students-with-summer-jobs but there were people there with real answers to questions. I asked the guy at the wind turbine booth some questions that I've never heard a straight answer to:
1. Are you reducing the noise of wind turbines? (People who live close to turbine farms complain about the hum.) His answer: They have added acoustic foam and have moved around some of the electronics to make things quieter.
2. How do wind turbines affect the flights of migratory birds? His answer: Radar shows that birds have learned to fly around the turbines. The incidents of birds flying into the turbines are few and the same as any other tall structure.
There were some other cool things: The next uniform for US soldiers makes them look like RoboCop. It looks like the next big thing in video games is using video cameras to make your body a part of the game. They just need to figure out how to make it easy enough for frustrated dads to set up after Christmas.
"at 20 mpg even with gasoline engines, it isn't hurting the environmnet nearly as much as cars"
Only in the sense that, say, in a place like Alaska or Brazil, you might be able to avoid building roads in the first place by using only this kind of vehicle there. It wouldn't be able to carry heavy loads though, so getting cargo in and out of those places would still be expensive.
For emissions, consider that the mileage figures given are probably the very ideal case. They might not include takeoff and landing, for instance, or they may be reflecting what the longest possible trip after takeoff would use. For short commutes, I'll bet the mileage figures will be as bad as an SUV, especially in a VTOL flight.
Then, ask yourself what speed the Skycar drivers will actually cruise at. Will everyone obediently drive at the ideal efficient cruising speed, just like everyone drives at 55 mph today, or will everyone want to floor it and go at 350+ top speed?
This was the first NextFest I had ever been to, and I gotta say I was unimpressed.
My biggest criticism would have to be how one-sided every presentation was. There was one story presented for every gadget, and no discussion or critique. It was all "this new technology is the future, and here's why it's great."
For example, at the NASA exhibit, they showed a model of a space probe that used nuclear power to propel itself into deep space for scientific research. Now, this research definetly has value, but they failed to mention the ENORMOUS risks posed by sending a spacecraft with plutonium or uranium into space. What if it fell apart or blew up in the atmosphere? Humanity would be fucked. And considering NASA's record for spacecraft disasters, this is a very real risk.
At one exhibit for automated aircraft, they showed a video which stated that computerized planes would never crash or have any problems because computers are 100% reliable. Like computer programmers never make mistakes! What do they think software updates and patches are for? One slight programming error, and your plane crashes into a mountain...
The defense contractors all had their booths, and showed off their latest killing machines. They were probably the most one-sided at NextFest. As you can imagine, the dialogue was always "these machines are going to save lives and protect the good people from evil-doers". No discussion or other points of view.
Then, of course, there were the flying cars. What a load of shit. They've been telling us we'll have flying cars for over 50 years, and they've made almost no progress in doing so.
There were also some pretty cool exhibits - like the game kids were lined up to play, where they shadow-boxed/beat with a bat video game opponents on big screens. (As well as the videophone.)
But all in all, I'd say NextFest will continue to be a big industry let's-pat-ourselves-on-the-back-fest until they bring in exhibits and presenters with other points of view.
New technology needs to be openly debated and discussed, not shoved down people's throats at flashy conventions.
-Mark