WIRED NEXTFEST - A PANORAMA REPORTAGE BY CAREL STRUYCKEN WIRED's vision of a new World's Fair, NextFest is a four-day festival of innovative products and technologies that are transforming our world. by Marco Trezzini
WIRED NextFest 2007 builds on the success of the previous three years, when the festival attracted more than 100,000 attendees, combined in New York (2006), Chicago (2005) and San Francisco (2004). The event brings together innovations from inventors and research and development labs from all around the world, for children and adults alike. Staged in thematic pavilions covering more than 150,000 square feet in the Los Angeles Convention Center, the exhibition features advances in communication, design, entertainment, energy, environment, exploration, medicine/health, robotics, security and transportation.
This year's NextFest in Los Angeles featured more than 160 interactive exhibits from leading scientists and researchers, so that visitors could experience the future of communication, design, entertainment, exploration, health, play, robots, transportation, security, and green living.
On 15.09.2007 at NextFest the Google Lunar X PRIZE was announced. “The Google Lunar X PRIZE calls on entrepreneurs, engineers and visionaries from all around the world, to return us to the lunar surface and explore the environment for the benefit of all humanity,” said Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation. “We are confident that teams from around the world will help develop new robotic and virtual presence technology, which will dramatically reduce the cost of space exploration.”
To win the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a team must successfully land a privately funded craft on the lunar surface and survive long enough to complete the mission goals of roaming about the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending a defined data package, called a “Mooncast”, back to Earth.
It is interesting that the collected digital data must include high resolution 360º panoramic photographs taken on the surface of the Moon. The total purse of the Google Lunar X PRIZE is $30 million (USD)
Carel Struycken is kindly sharing his panorama reportage with VRMAG readers:
"We were invited to shoot some panorama for SpaceX a company offering the world's lowest cost flight to orbit."
SpaceX’s Musk announced they will donate profits they would normally make on space launches to lower the cost of launch of X PRIZE competitors’ entries. Other organizations like SETI will provide services to competitors for reduced or no cost.
On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landed their Lunar Module on the moon's Sea of Tranquility and became the first two humans to walk on the moon.
The Dragon spacecraft is made up of a pressurized capsule and unpressurized trunk used for Earth to LEO transport of pressurized cargo, unpressurized cargo, and/or crew members. Initiated internally by SpaceX in 2005, Dragon will be utilized to fulfill the NASA COTS contract for demonstration of cargo re-supply of the International Space Station ISS.
"I had wanted to do a panorama "reportage" series for a while and this seemed a good occasion. Immediately one is confronted with some typical journalistic dillemnas: The most photogenic or the easiest to visualize displays are not always the most interesting.
At NextFest, two of the most interesting booths had to do with solar energy. There was a booth from the University of Hawaii where they were showing oil producing algae. This may one day be a viable way to produce energy. Another booth displayed a new kind of spherical solar receptor. They were pea-sized and there was just no way to make them into an interesting panorama without some very careful planning and a more controlled environment.
Next to the solar sphere booth was the UCLA racing team providing enough muscle power to keep a super computer running. That was a great display that drew a lot of spectators, but from a technical point of view it was not as interesting as the pea-sized solar cells.
I guess I broke another journalistic taboo by "staging" a few shots, such as the gentleman who was walking on two computerized prosthetic legs and also had two computerized prosthetic arms. I asked him to stand next to the Japanese android. He was moving around with such grace that I only noticed his prosthetic hand when he needed slightly more time than usual to grab the business card I handed him.
There were also a few very interesting art projects, using specially designed display technologies of which I did not shoot panoramas. One display was projected on what looked like white spandex. You could get some very interesting distortions by pushing and stretching the fabric.
The NextFest series was very labor intensive in postproduction, because of all the moving people. As so much of the action was taking place on video screens, I wanted to make sure those would not look over or under exposed, so all these panos were also shot with three bracketed exposures of which I mostly used just two for the layers in Photoshop.
I like shooting group portraits and with those I usually crank up the contrast much higher for the faces and put them on a separate layer. Sometimes that becomes quite labor intensive, for instance the almost 500 people in the NextFest group pano. All panos were shot with the Canon 5D/10.5mm at 1600ISO."
