Global Warming Can Be Fun

So I had been given an invitation to what was billed as a “cocktail party”. There were plenty of free drinks, tasty hors d’oeuvres, and interesting people to mix with, so from that point of view, I guess you could call it that. But the scale was a little off — there were several hundred people there, and it was held on a trade show floor, with the representatives of a variety of really cool products hanging about to do demonstrations.

My intent was to meet people and talk about global warming, and see if I could generate some interest in Melting Point. Some interesting points in that direction included:

• The head of the wind generation program at GE Energy, who has promised to send me some information on wind technologies.
• A product line manager for coal gasification technologies at GE Energy. These people had a little video game you could play to learn about coal gasification. They used arcade-style gameplay to teach facts and figures about the technology. I actually didn’t think it was very effective, because you didn’t need to learn the facts to play the game. But I did manage to walk away with the high score for the night.
• The CEO of quietrevolution, a company making a wind turbine that spins vertically. I’m thrilled to see that someone is selling these. Under ideal conditions, they’re about as efficient as normal propellor-style turbines — but under conditions of shifting wind, they can win, because they don’t care what direction the wind is blowing from!
• Several new hybrid vehicles and an awesome show car from GM called the Hy-Wire. They created a flat deck less than a foot thick that contains all of the motive power for the car — batteries, motors, etc. Then they just sat a passenger compartment on top of it. Since the whole thing is drive-by-wire, the driver’s console is small and can be moved to either of the two driver seats.
• Several people from the in Sweden who were working on interesting ways to indicate how much power people were using in their lives. They built a radiant heater that uses light bulbs to provide infrared — the brighter it is, the more power you’re using. They had a power cord that lights up based on how much power it’s supplying. And a chandelier that opens like a flower as you save energy over time.

There were other cool things not related to global warming:

• A neat installation of an optical harp — lasers mounted high, shining down vertically to sensors; breaking the beams caused the corresponding note to play. It was fun for making noise, not so easy to play a tune.
• I spent a while talking to the CEO of Telbotics, a company that makes a cute little telepresence robot that can be used to allow (say) sick kids to attend class and have a “presence” in the classroom. But this guy has been around since the early days of virtual reality — in fact, he and his associates invented the term way back when. They also invented the DataGlove and a few other goodies.
• A company that is working on a game where you actually walk around in order to move within the game world. They were doing this on the small scale — the size of a room — rather than city-wide.
• A very cool and rather insane little device called the WheelSurf, which is a motorized wheel where you sit inside the wheel and the rim rotates around you on a little gasoline motor. I just can’t get the image out of my head of gunning the engine just as someone grabs the outer rim, and you go spinning around over and over inside…
• Star Trek got it wrong — instead of the whole door sliding open, someone was showing a door that consisted of a whole vertical stack of two-inch slats, each with an infrared distance sensor. As you walk up to the door, each slat opens up just wide enough for you to walk through — opening a person-sized hole to minimize the amount of air exchanged.
• The PixelRoller — a “paint” roller with a USB connection. You can feed it an image and then roll the device along the wall — and it leaves behind a set of pixels corresponding to the image.

There were many more cool and wonderful items (and a few creepy ones!), but that should give you a flavor.