I saw the future, but I forgot to charge my camera batteries.
Even though I actually remembered to bring my camera to Wired Nextfest, somehow I still ended up not being able to snap any pictures. I’ll tell you about some of the interesting things I saw anyway (and use everyone else’s pictures to show you). Thank goodness for flickr.
Image by SFRevu.com
Augmented reality seemed like a really big hit with the crowds. There were all sorts of interactive games that turned real-world movements into digital interactions. Usually these consisted of a camera setup that captured your movements and displayed them onto a screen. The characters in Kick Ass Kung-Fu responded to real-life kicks and punches:
Image by SFRevu.com
Here’s another project where the camera picked up on your movements, called Full Body Games. The objective was to squish the colored blocks to score points:
Image by harvardavenue
Daniel Rozin’s Circles Mirror took live footage from the camera and translated it into rotations of each of the 900 overlapping paper discs, creating a mechanical “reflection”:
Image by giladlotan
The freakily-realistic robots were also out in full force, including Alex HUBO (a.k.a. Einstein Bot), who I didn’t see in action because a couple of the scientists were making repairs/adjustments:
Image by nycarthur
I did, however, see the Japanese Android Receptionist. This was somewhat mind-blowing, to say the least:
Image by nycarthur
One more brain-expanding piece was the Khronos Projector. By pressing on the spandex screen, you could reveal a rewound or fast-forwarded version of the video on the screen. When I was there, they were playing a video of a cityscape taken during the day. Pressing the screen would make this happen:
There were way too many cool and interesting projects and displays to write about, so be sure to check out bloggingNEXT, the official blog, for more coverage, as well as the flickr images tagged with “NextFest”.
Science of Sleep
Later in the day, I visited the Michel Gondry Science of Sleep “exhibition of sculpture and creeply little pathlogical gifts”. I made it there for the last half hour of the last day of the exhibit, so I didn’t have time to run home and charge the camera. Again, flickr comes to the rescue.
I saw the film last week, and in hindsight it was good, but not in the way I was expecting it to be. Anyway, I think what surprised me the most about the exhibit is how real (or maybe a better word would be “not-faked”) these objects are. For instance, there’s this one scene in the movie where Stephane, the main character, is talking to his parents in a dream. As he’s doing so, he uses two pieces of rope hung from the ceiling to control an image of himself on an LCD screen. Each rope corresponds with one of his eyes, and pulling them would cause the eyes to independently open and close.
Image by Hancy
But it wasn’t a simulated special effect! The thing actually worked! Here are said pieces of rope on the opposite side of the room:
Image by medfly70
Here’s a piano that was used in the film, modified it a bit for the exhibit. They cut an opening in the front and mounted an LCD. Each key on the piano would cause the video on the screen to change. Sometimes you’d see a recorded clip of another person pressing the same key. If you pressed two or more keys at the same time, the video would go into split-screen mode.
Image by g h o s t w r i t e r
The “creepy little pathological gifts” (which I don’t think were a part of the movie, but were definitely in the same vein) were insanely inventive too. This one was my favorite:
Image by Mr. Hulot
And I just love this shot:
Image by kenyee
So there it is. Two inspiring events back-to-back… not bad for a Saturday afternoon.
Update: In light of this whole using-others’-photos deal, check out the Blind Camera. It’s a camera that pulls an image from the Web that was taken at the same time the Blind Cam’s button is pressed. It links two totally separate experiences with to one single action: pushing the button on the camera. Brilliant!
