Tara and I stopped by the Wired NextFest yesterday at Fort Mason in San Francisco to check out the gadgets and gizmos of the future. Saw some pretty neat things.
First we stopped by the main stage to hear Andrew Stanton, Oscar-winning writer of Toy Story, A Bug's Life, and Finding Nemo, talk about how the folks are Pixar learned to tell stories through CGI. Andrew was a little over the top in his attempt to be humble while still impressive, but he was certainly entertaining. The best part was when he ran the casting clips of Al Pachino and Alec Baldwin. Apparently, the way Pixar casts for its anime is to pick memorable lines from past films by A-List actors and then create CGI scripts of the visual characters they are up to play, saying those lines. So, for example, Stanton showed us what Hopper from a Bug's Life might have looked and sounded like if he had Pachino's voice and read the lines from Scarface. We also saw Hopper might have looked like with Baldwin reading lines from "The Cooler." Obviously they were going for a kind of "gangster" character. BTW, Kevin Spacey ended up getting the part.
After that, we just tooled around. It was pretty crowded, so it took a while to get anywhere. We checked out some cool touch-panel table displays where you could move objects around on a plasma screen by just touching them and dragging with your finger. We also checked out the Optical Camouflage suit, which was pretty cool. You really couldn't see the person wearing it if you were looking through the camera. Without the special lens, though, it was still pretty obviously a person. Very Predator-like, though.
Another highlight was the booth on Human Emulation Robotics, which were being touted as the future of entertainment. No longer would we need actors who could mess up a line. These robots will simply read scripts in perfect tone and cadence for the camera, or better yet, in person in your home. Creepy. :)
And, of course, what would a FutureFest be without Cars of the Future. GM had a few on hand, showing off all-plastic shells and fuel-cell engines.
The interiors looked pretty roomy, with lots of leg-room. The front was a little weird, though, I thought.
I like the idea of having more visibility, but the lack of privacy kinda creeped me out. And speaking of privacy creep-outs, there was also a booth demonstrating a Facial Pattern Recognition Scanner.
A live video feed of the crowd gets run through a brute-force recognition algorithm to locate patterns it recognizes (e.g. faces) and then correlates those with objects stored in a database. The proprietor of the booth tried to focus on how "useful" it could be for gathering information on shopping mall purchase patterns and grocery store aisle selections but the national security and airport surveilance implications were impossible to avoid.
Moving back into the world of warm fuzzies, we also saw:
Kiddie robots
Power-assisted exo-skeletons
Jack-In-The-Beanstalk super-growth plants
NASA rovers
and remote-controlled cell phone camera/transmitters.
All in all, a good day. And once you got back outside, the weather made it a beautiful day there too, by the Bay.
For the whole photogallery, click here.
Update:Librarian in Black has her own review of NextFest. I didn't include any real criticisms, but after reading her review, I completely agree with the layout and traffic flow issues.
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