Public gets firsthand view of the future – Robots, brain games, flying machines draw big crowds at NextFest tech expo

In a pavilion filled with the imaginations of inventors, Dorthy Pautz imagined herself at the helm of an "AirScooter,” a prototype flying contraption that looked like the offspring of a helicopter and motorcycle with pontoons.

"I’d go up on that,” said Pautz as she looked over the craft, one of 110 new technologies on display at last weekend’s Wired magazine NextFest technology expo. "I’d do that before I’d go hang gliding.”

Benny Evangelista, Chronicle Staff Writer

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And the projected price tag of $50,000 sounded reasonable. "Well, that’s like a Lexus,” said Pautz, who was chaperoning a group of San Francisco fifth- graders attending the three-day show, which ended Sunday.

It wasn’t as if Pautz could actually whip out her credit card to buy an actual AirScooter just yet, although the company working on the ultralight one- seat recreational aircraft hopes to have a model ready next year.

Selling products wasn’t the point of NextFest — rather, it was to give the general public a chance to get a firsthand view of interesting new technologies that normally only scientists, researchers, military leaders, analysts or journalists see.

In fact, AirScooter President Dwaine Barnes said his prototype craft, in development for three years, was making its first public appearance.

NextFest attendees got to play Brainball, a game controlled by brainwaves. The less you think, the better you are at the game.

"I just thought of white space,” said Quincy Nelson, 11, in explaining the Brainball strategy he used to beat a classmate at Clarendon Elementary School of San Francisco.

Other students saw technology that measures the "fingerprint” of brainwaves. They also were able to see the "transparent cloak,” which makes a person or object appear semi-invisible, and high-tech goggles that present computer graphics in 3-D.

And a marketing firm showed off the latest in advertising ploys — "T- Shirt TV,” shirts with LCD monitors across the front that turn anyone into a human TV commercial.

Of the various robots on display, the only one that is already in consumer homes is the Roomba, a saucer-shaped, $200 automatic vacuum cleaner made by iRobot Corp. of Burlington, Mass. Colin Angle, iRobot co-founder and chief executive, said the company earned about $50 million in revenue last year.

But iRobot also demonstrated its Packbot, which is already being used by the military to relay video, audio and sensor readings to soldiers from a remote distance. Angle said one Packbot came back to iRobot in pieces, blown up while keeping soldiers safe from a bomb in Iraq.

Also at NextFest was a computer-operated Power Assist Suit, designed by researchers at Japan’s Kanagawa Institute of Technology.

The computer-operated suit, which resembled the robotic exoskeleton suits from the science-fiction thriller "Aliens,” was created for uses such as freeing nurses from the backbreaking task of lifting patients.

Honda Motors showed off its Asimo, short for "Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility.” The 4-foot-tall robot is the latest in an 18-year-long research effort by Honda to create a robot that moves as smoothly as a human.

A crowd of students attending NextFest cheered Asimo as it danced the disco and walked up and down stairs. But the robot is still far from becoming a household item like Rosie the Robot in "The Jetsons," said Jeffrey Smith, a senior corporate affairs and communications manager for American Honda Motor Co.

Honda believes there is a future market for robots that can, for example, assist elderly or disabled people with daily tasks.

"We really think that someday it’s going to be, ‘Asimo, get my medicine,’ or ‘Asimo, get me water,’ or ‘Asimo, walk the dog,’ " Smith said.

Many of the innovations at NextFest still need years of work before they can become common consumer products, if ever.

General Motors, for example, displayed its experimental Hy-Wire, a high- tech car powered by hydrogen-fuel-cell technology that even proponents admit may be a decade or more away from the mass market.

Next to the Hy-Wire, GM trotted out the Firebird I, an experimental turbine engine car built in 1952 that surfaced in name only in the 1960s as a regular gasoline-powered muscle car.

Nearby was a nonworking prototype of a two-seat Moller Skycar, a vertical liftoff craft that Davis’ Paul Moller first began working on in his garage in 1963.

Moller also showed video of a hovering four-seat Skycar prototype, which is designed for a top speed of 368 mph.

But Moller said the only flying the cars have done has been in wind tunnels.

One aircraft designed to fly for months at a time is the Helios, a solar- powered, flexible-wing plane that has made a successful test flight high over the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

That test, which beamed down a high-definition TV signal, showed how the Helios can float 12 miles above the Earth to provide cell phone or Wi-Fi transmissions, said Patrick Wright, an aeronautical engineer from Helios’ developer AeroVironment Inc. of Simi Valley (Ventura County).

The company hopes to get commercial Helios off the ground in the next two years.

Sponsors of the exhibition included General Electric, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, Comcast and The Chronicle.

Chronicle staff writer Jan Sandred contributed to this story.E-mail Benny Evangelista at [email protected].