News: NextFest Review

Last weekend we attended the NextFest in New York City - Wired Magazine’s third annual “World Fair of the Future” which showcases the future of consumer technology and lifestyle. We’ve selected a few highlights for you that we found particularly interesting:

Robots:

If NextFest is a glimpse of our future then we’ll surely all live and love our robots soon. From the cute Nabaztag Wi-Fi robot bunnies to NASA’s awesome displays of futuristic devices that are actually used in space. We found particularly interesting the NASA observation drone that was just too freaking similar to that floating ball Luke Skywalker practices with in Star Wars.

Entertainment:

The play & entertainment pavilion was chock-full of futuristic games. An overarching trend was the way we interact with games through body movement and motion sensing. Interestingly some of the most fascinating displays were more art and education than shoot & kill. Our favorite by far was the beautiful Japanese sound fountain - projecting colorful notes as they flow out of multi-colored faucets into water. Equipped with a smart ladle one could scoop up notes and place them into another part of the fountain, affecting the overall soundscape.

Marketing:

Marketing wasn’t a distinct category of the NextFest setup but surely did every sponsor from GE to Atari plug a little of their innovations. The coolest of them all was the Virgin Galactic display. As one of the premiere space tourism companies, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic plans to take passengers into an 8 minute zero gravity flight for about $200.000 a ticket. The price will surely drop once more people sign up for the first flights starting in 2008. Besides the futuristic concept, the actual design of the ship, it’s cabin and the spaceport was equally amazing.

Design:

Another cool showcase was the design pavilion which displayed everything from innovative building materials to intelligent fabrics. We particularly liked the Pixelbrush, which painted a scanned picture via a large painters brush onto any surface.

Trend Impact: As tech savvy trend scouts we were thoroughly impressed. Unfortunately most of the innovations won’t be coming to your local Best Buy anytime soon but they did showcase how each and every one of us will be affected by them in the “near” future. Judging by our experience of working with corporate innovation labs around the world in this age of “accelerated culture” everyone is keen to make this a reality sooner than later.

Links:
NextFest

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