I was in NYC earlier in the month as part of a Dwyer family visit with my relatives (who live in New Jersey, just outside of New York). Being the nerd that I am, I noticed that the time of our trip coincided with the annual Wired Magazine technology expo, Nextfest. Needless to say, I talked Alicia and my cousin Simon into checking it out with me. I think they both secretly resent me now, but what can I say? We got to experience the future… TODAY.

I’m not too sure what I expected from this show, but it was a little bit underwhelming in terms of scale. There were still some pretty amazing gadgets though (and some pretty silly ones too).

One of the first things we saw upon entering was a giant screen that projected pictures onto fog. I’m totally getting one of these for our house. Walking through the ethereal images, we observed GE’s Kitchen of the Future. Apparently the Kitchen of the Future will guide you through recipes and help set the oven temperature for you. Come on man, I was hoping to see a Star Trek food replicator by now, and all I got was a fridge that tells me when I’m out of pickles?

Over in the Space Exploration area they had some cool astronaut suits, a model of Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic’s Spaceshipone, and a droid that can be moved remotely with a virtual reality suit (among other things). It was actually pretty surreal seeing a demo of this in action, as they had a TV screen showing the robot’s POV through its cameras. It like, totally blew my mind man. In the meantime, someone across the way was trying to tell people about the wonders of Multispectral Imaging. BORING!

On to Robot Row, where highlights included some ballroom dancing robots (those crazy Japanese inventors!), a couple robotic arms spinning some tunes on wax, and Alex HUBO, the now famous walking robot with the expressive face of Albert Einstein. This was second in eerie realism only to the Kokoro “Actroid”, designed to be a receptionist and/or nanny. Creepy stuff.

Then we got our body heat scanned courtesy of Xerox, and relaxed in the lounge area with a nice cool can of Coca-Cola Blāk (coffee-flavoured Coke… GOOD STUFF). The lounge area also had some cool games projected on screens and floors which you could interact with physically courtesy of Playmotion. Looks like the Nintendo Wii might have some competition!

We quickly skipped over the military stuff (BomBots, ’nuff said), and The Future of Green exhibits (pretty hard to make windmills exciting) and went straight to the Entertainment and Gaming sections.

It was here that we saw some of the coolest stuff, and some of the weirdest. Kick Ass Kung-Fu is a side scrolling fighting game that motion captures your movement and inserts a digitized version of you into the game, along with any weapons you happen to be holding. Kids were going crazy over this thing, swinging their backpacks, sweaters and just about anything else they could get their hands on. We also had a chat with Quasi, The Interactive Robot. This thing was pretty crazy… it seemed like he could remember people he had talked to earlier in the day by their image and sound, and conversations with him were incredibly realistic and expressive. I was dumbfounded, until found out later that there was actually a “man behind the curtain”! What a scam!

At this point we thought we’d try our hand at Conspiratio, the “virtual drinking game”. I still don’t quite understand what the heck this thing was. There was some sort of mechanical cup with a straw that could be placed on top of coasters with pictures of different types of food. When you sucked, you didn’t get any taste, but rather just blasts of air that sort of simulated the feeling of sucking up certain things in a straw. Whenever someone would look up quizically at the Japanese dude running the booth he would just smile and offer, “Give you drinking sensation!” I guess there was a game element to this as well, although it obviously went over my head.

Last but not least, Simon and I had to try out the door of the future… the E-Taf Automatic Door. It has metal strips that slide open horizontally to surround the shape of your body. I guess the idea is to keep the door as airtight as possible while you pass through it, but let’s be honest… it’s just looks freakin’ cool. The only problem was I kind of broke the door, it took me 3 or 4 tries to actually get it to open all the way. Maybe I need to lose some weight? There’s a scary thought.

All in all, Wired Nextfest was a strange but enjoyable experience, and worth the price of admission (especially considering it also counted as a renewal of my yearly Wired subscription). But I will say this: the next time I head to New York I’ll probably spend a little less time seeking out dancing robots and Japanese straw games. I still can’t believe we missed Brainball though… the game you win by relaxing!

(More photos can be found at my Flickr account.)