Yesterday was certainly a mission of discovery. As I walked the floor with my students from CalArts, we were rooting out many new and interesting twists (sometimes literally). One of yesterday's best discoveries for me was the DigiLED DigiFlex. it's a high resolution SMD based LED product that comes in a rubber form factor that allows you to bend it curve it, or wring it out like a sponge. Literally. It has magnetic attachment points on the back, and can be earily assembled into almost any shape imaginable... It's front end was admirably, totally simple, allowing for media mapping and playback out DVI outputs.
Was also fascinated to check out the new Element Labs Helix P1. With variable pixel pitch, the P1 is one of the best manifestations I have ever seen of SMD LEDs on a 'wire'. You could easily make almost any form facttor of screen you wanted to with this stuff, including three dimensional clouds, any shape you could wrap with product, or maybe even wearable. Kudos Nils...
At Barco/High End the ShowPix and StudioPix products were generating great buzz, great LED wash light, and really cool 8 bit looking graphics. I could picture hanging a whole bunch of these and pixel mapping the entirety.
I continue to be smitten with UVA's D3 Media Serving, previsualizing, all around control environment. The software is so powerful and so intuitive it's hard to fix it in one category. This is where the rest of the media server market will get sometime in the next 4 years.
I'll be scouting the floor some more this morning, as well as appearing on the panel of cheeky programming phenom Rob Halliday discussing collaboration.
More to follow. Bonniol Out.