Jeffrey Sipprell: June 2005 Archive
June 27, 2005
Nextfest 2005
I had a chance to head down to Navy Pier on Sunday to check out Wired's Nextfest. Overall it was a pretty solid expo, though anything that was cool and interactive had a pretty substantial wait to it. Certainly the highlight for me personally was seeing the cloned cat - just to see life that is that complex and know it's created by men is pretty eerie. $32,000 if you're interested - and dogs are on their way this fall.
There were a number of pieces there that could have some very interesting direct or indirect uses in the design and building industries:
Kennedy and Violich's studio from the University of Michigan, Nomads and Nanomaterials, had their portable light project on display. For those who don't know, they are energy producing textiles that have embedded solar cells, electronic circuits and polymer batteries. These combine to power several LED lights that are inserted into the fabric (I was actually pretty amazed at how much light just one single LED gives off in this fabric). I spent a bit of time on their website and it looks like they are also using the homegrown tech in several other uses such as a stool, a workshop and a storefront protoype.
Continuing on in the Design exhibit of the expo we have a couple of interesting pieces from the Interactive Institute in Sweden. The flower lamp was particularly cool (the lamp 'blooms' and changes it shape when energy consumption in a household has been low for some time). The energy curtain also appeared to be a simple, but effective way of combining textiles and solar collection (sadly it was impossible to put to use in the festival hall at the pier).
Other noteworthy projects in the design area were the Self-Healing Polymers by the Beckman Institute at the Univ of Illinois, the classic invisible cloak from Japan (the guy showing it off seemed to be having a great time just smiling and twirling), and lastly the Gelforce pad which was also by the University of Tokyo. It was a pretty badass piece of hardware that calculated deformations and force to create some pretty psychadelic renderings on the sreen.
There were a few letdowns in the design pavilion. James Clar's 3D display cube wasn't as good as I thought it would be after seeing a couple of images in Wired. Right now the device seems a bit on the crude side, but I think the potential is there to do something really good in the future. The piece by Digital Artforms that was highlighted in the June issue of Wired was a no show. Apparently you could draw in 3-D using two wireless magnetically tracked controllers.
Still, all in all, it was a very good exhibition. I didn't quite buy GM's 'devotion' to fuel cells, what with their insistence that Bushie doesn't raise the mandatory mpg's on cars. But they sure looked cool. Some company was even flouting flying cars that were FAA approved by 2009. So the place sure wasn't without the outlandish futurism that was a highlight of our old world's fairs.
Posted by jsipprell at 02:30 PM | Comments (0)