Future Schlock - Hilarious Take On NextFest's Parade Of Techno-Crap

[hatrack]

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"I wait through the long line of those of us who had not bought advance tix and dive right in. I find myself confronted with a nice young man demonstrating the Gummi from Sony, a "bendable, credit-card sized computer interface." The idea is that instead of typing, or pressing buttons, or moving a joystick, you bend this little credit card thingy. Not obvious to you what the advantage of bending a credit card might be? Me neither. Unfortunately, I remain unenlightened on this matter, because the Gummi had broken. "It worked really well this morning," the nice young man pointed out helpfully.

Next door was the Reality Helmet. Supposedly, this helmet takes the sounds and images that surround you in the real world and translate them into different sounds and images you experience inside the Reality Helmet. But when I strap in, all I get was a very static purple image with pink in the middle, and a recurring loop of not very interesting electronic sound. I try waving my hands in front of it, clapping loudly in front of it, and swinging my head from side to side, but nothing I can do interrupted the monotonous loop inside the helmet. The problem, the man from Reality Helmet explains, is that we were just in the wrong environment. Not a good one for the helmet. Right helmet, wrong reality.

No worries, there are fascinating things everywhere. Nearby, You're the Conductor - A Digital Conducting Experience for the Public invited me to "Find your inner musician." A video of a symphony orchestra is projected on a screen. I am instructed to stand in front of the screen, and wave around odd microphone-size thing. The faster I wave the thing, the faster the video plays. And the farther I move it from side to side, the louder the music gets. Wow. A volume control. Hooray. A speed control.

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Finally, I stop by the car displays. Both GM and GE are on hand, showing hydrogen fuel cell car prototypes. They look really cool. They have very futuristic lines. Their motors are integrated into their chassis. They are the stars of the whole show. The only problem is that they are a hoax. Well, not precisely a hoax, but something close. The only byproduct that hydrogen fuel cells generate is water. Nice clean water coming out of the tailpipe. Hooray! The problem is where to get the hydrogen. It doesn't exist by itself naturally. It has be to be extracted from other things. This could be done in a very dirty way, say, with a coal-fired plant, or it could be done with, um... some cleaner technology that does not yet exist. Fuel cell cars do not solve the pollution problem, they move it from the powering of the car to the manufacture of the fuel.

There were no hydrogen extraction technologies on display at the NextFest."

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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18872