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"

Comments

Not worth the money

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It was like a flashback to 1986!

[K8Fan]

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!