I was in LA recently with work and I happened to find out about Wired Next Fest through a chatter post on iminlikewithyou.com. So off I went to see what it was about.
Showing posts with label wired next fest 2007 la convention center. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wired next fest 2007 la convention center. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Coloured lights projected on to screen of falling dust
This was near the entrance of the Next Fest and and had the advantage of traditional video projection screens in that the audience could actually walk through the screen sort of like an Alice Cooper stage show circa 1989.
Magnetic Liquid Brightly Lit Cones
Not sure what the purpose of these are - but they were interesting to look at and constantly changing made entirely of a thick, magnetic fluid.
Flight Patterns Touch Screen
Here's a touch screen that shows a real time visualization of flight data. Sort of a mashup of google earth and flightstats.
Google Sky: The satellites point the opposite direction
Google Engineer demos their Google Sky project (part of Google Earth) ...let's the user's explore constellations and distant galaxies. It has almost street level view clarity.
Google showing their Google Moon product
Google engineers demo their Google Moon Maps plus wikipedia-style facts mash up.. All the photos were stitched together from space missions (most from the 1960's). This was another one of my favorite projects. (Dawa = moon afterall!)
Jetson's Space Capsule
Space X's Dragon Capsule on display. It was smaller than expected but the rockets that propel these things into space are gigantic.
Rocket Scientists shows Nasa's Second Life World
This guy went from building rockets to building virtual models of them in Nasa's Second Life world. You could even go inside the rockets and see dashboard controls as well as launch rockets.. well you could if you had the right permissions.
From silicon to innocence
Here's a picture of a school age child drawing with an interactive whiteboard. The tool palette bore a striking resemblance to Adobe products.
Ridiculous Use of Silicon
I took this picture because it was silly to see such an obvious and use of silicon to market a racing game. IMHO Silicon Implants + Cars = Silly.
Yahoo's Visualization of Email Traffic
This photo is a bit blurry but at the Yahoo booth they had a projection of email traffic in north america in real time.
Bump Tops Virtual Touch Screen Desktop
Seemed like a convoluted way to interact with your desk top. It was fun for 5 minutes but I'd rather just have one click do it for me than manually having to arrange things... too much like the real world :-)
Carl Sagan's Time Travel becomes reality?
Here was a video projected on to a mesh screen. Pressing on the mesh made it possible to fast forward, rewind or pause the video. The video consisted of people and cars at a busy intersection and by interacting with it you could make people and cars walk backwards or speed up.
Clothes that hug
Embedded computing in action. I didn't see a demo of it but here on display were clothes that could be remotely controlled to deliver hugs to the wearer. Great invention for maintaining long distance relationships.
Brainloop: Navigating Google Earth with Brainwaves
This was one of my favorite projects. Here one of the brain loop team members is navigating google earth solely with his brainwaves obtained from an Electro-encephalograph (EEG) device. 4 electrodes were sufficient and the man in the picture had learned to use his thoughts as if he were actually making a movement right or left. These thoughts were translated into directional movements that determined the path he took in Google's Earth application.
Bipedal Robotic Chair
Here is a bipedal robotic chair equipped with a joy stick. Fascinating to watch this move around the floor.
Robots with facial recognition and 'human-like' facial expressions
This was an impressive but slightly eerie demonstration of a robot. It had a latex face and wires/metal body. It appeared to make eye contact with the audience and respond to laughter and waves. It had a limited range of gestures such as making a peace sign and running motion with it's metal limbs. The guy in the white lab coat to the right added an even more sci-fi twist to it. Whatever the merits of this invention - it certainly was a crowd puller.
Cycle powered servers
This was a demonstration of how cyclists generated the electricity to power a server. Not really sure what the server was serving up.. but it made an impressive demonstration. Too bad the cyclists didn't have there own terminals or internet devices. Perhaps this is the environmentally friendly office of the future: working and exercising at the same time.
Kevin Demos Yahoo's Fire Eagle @ Wired Next Fest
I knew Kevin back from my days at sdo.net. He has moved on to bigger and better things. Here he is at the Yahoo booth demo'ing fire eagle the new geo location look up service from Yahoo. It's really great - it offers a web service where a user's location can be supplied based on the cellphone signal alone.. no need for zip code entry and is a good fix before GPS enabled mobile phones really take off.
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