[extropy-chat] San Francisco NextFest this weekend

[Adrian Tymes]

--- BillK <bill at wkidston.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> Sounds like west coast extropians will enjoy what's
> on display at
> NextFest in San Francisco this weekend.
> Admission to the NextFest and the ASIMO exhibition
> is $15 for adults,
> free for children under 12.

There was an additional session on Friday, free for
non-profits and the press.  Or those who have
connections to the event's sponsors.  ;)

> The exhibits include the Moller Skycar, a
> four-passenger vehicle from
> Moller International of Davis. The Jetsons-style
> craft is small enough
> to drive on the ground, but can take off vertically
> and fly as fast as
> 380 mph.

And is intended for near-ground use only in industrial
areas.  I had thought they were grounded for want of
regulatory approval, but they've got that: it's street
legal, where the noise it generates isn't a problem.
They're working on reducing the noise so they can get
approval to run it in residential areas.  (It'll run
at airports too; I specifically asked about integrated
airport/residential areas like Cameron Park, where
every house has a hangar and the streets are made for
light airplanes to taxi from house to the local
airstrip, and they said it'd be okay there too.)

> Then there's a "transparent cloak,'' technology from
> the Tachi Lab at
> the University of Tokyo that seems straight out of a
> Harry Potter book.
> The raincoat-like cloak is made out of
> "retro-reflective'' material
> covered with tiny beads that reflect light back in
> the same direction it
> came. The cloak is designed to make whatever it is
> covering, a body or
> object, appear transparent by projecting video shot
> with a camera from
> behind the cloak onto the front of the cloak.

This suffers from severe edge effects: one can easily
see the outline, due to optical properties inherent in
the details of how they pull this off.  I talked to
the chief scientist (among the representatives
present, anyway), and he all but admitted they aren't
going for the obvious military application because
they can't see any way around this.  The application
they are going for is see-through surfaces, like
replacing the rear view mirror in cars or letting
pilots see through the floor of their planes.  I can
think of cheaper, more technologically mature
solutions for those problems, but this would seem to
work.

> For fun and games, there's Brainball, which is best
> described as an
> anti- game, because the goal is to achieve nothing.
> Developed by Sweden's Interactive Institute,
> Brainball players wear
> headbands with biosensors that measure brain waves.
> The brain activity
> is then transmitted by wire to a special game table
> to control a small
> ball. The object of the game is to move the ball
> into an opponent's goal
> area, but the more relaxed a player is, the more he
> or she controls the
> ball.

Having had a special connection to that technology's
development, I had wanted to speak to the people
behind this, but most of the exhibitors apparently
went on break just as I reached this exhibit.

Fortunately, I did manage to catch the exhibitor of
what I thought was the single coolest thing there
(though I admit this is very subjective): someone
actually had a working exoskeleton on display.  It
would only last a few handfuls of minutes if not
plugged in to external power, but from their video
demonstration, it did seem to amplify strength
available to the human frame, primarily for lifting
tasks.

Unfortunately, its makers have a very wimpy business
plan (at least, that they'll admit to): the only use
they're going for is lifting patients in and out of
hospital beds.  Paramedical uses are iffy;
construction use is right out, even though it would be
far more useful there.  And don't even start with
military or civilian outdoorsman applications (like
hauling heavy loads, including a power generator and
fuel, over long distances on foot).  So we're not
likely to see this particular model get wide use,
barring change or enlightenment of their management.
(Even the greatest technology can be denied its
potential by unwise business decisions.)

Most of the rest of the NextFest...frankly, I was
already familiar with about 3/4ths of the exhibited
technology.  (Raise your hand if you haven't heard of
UAVs by now.  Anyone?  Granted, laser-powered UAVs are
a new twist, and not too many have heard of NASA's
Personal Satellite Assistants even though they've been
in the media before.  Facial recognition, and
thermograph "lie detectors", are probably more
familiar to the members of this list.)

Least Revolutionary Advance On Display: automobiles
which incorporate the engine block into the chassis,
so both the front and back are open for cargo space.
They had about 1/6th of the show floor dedicated to
various iterations of this.  (Okay, yeah, it's a good
engineering feat.  But it's still just a car, in
contrast to the relatively fundamentally new things on
display everywhere else.)