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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"
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.
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.
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.