Last Saturday I got the chance to roam around WIRED NextFest, an awe-inspiring showcase of wonderful new innovations at the Los Angeles Convention Center. It reminded me of visiting the Future World pavillions at EPCOT Center as a kid, in terms of giddiness for tomorrow’s tech. Below is just a taste of what I saw.
This is FogScreen, an ultrafine curtain of vapor that displays images from a projector. (Including your own face, when you get up close.)
Graphical displays from Hitachi’s Life Microscope. This watch-like device records data about your life rhythms and feeds it to your PC via Wi-fi, helping you to improve (and improvise upon) your quality of life.
Glad to see virtual worlds represented at NextFest. Here’s Second Life on display via Millions of Us, a group that helps organizations establish themselves inside virtual publics. (And, in classic Second Life fashion, the program crashed the computer and had to be restarted.)
One of those bad-ass Minority Report touchscreens!
Google Earth showed off their new Sky feature. You can explore, oh, a hundred million stars and two hundred million galaxies from your desktop. I always love meeting Google employees — there’s no other group of people more passionate about their work.
NASA was all over the place at NextFest, which I loved because I’m a huge space geek. (Space Camp class of ’91! Woo!!) Anyway, here’s a rover driving over some delighted kids.
Here’s Zou Ren Ti (founder of XSM), who just happened to build a lifelike android twin of himself. Can you tell who is who?
This interactive display meshes your image with a patchwork of 500 YouTube videos. (They call it the YouTube Mirror.)
More coverage: NextFest is all that and then some: NPR report on BoingBoing.
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