BUENOS AIRES – Welcome to tech heaven.
Curious souls are stepping into the world of tomorrow at InternetExpoLA – covering 5,000-square metres at this exhibition centre in Argentina‘s capital Buenos Aires.
At this stall, players of the popular High Strike game get their scores via an app that sends results and live pictures to their Facebook and Twitter accounts.
While tech fans are the key audience, organisers say the gathering is ‘formatted’ for fun.
Displays allow visitors to stimulate the speed-related cognitive areas of their brain by playing a game in front of a screen.
Digital aficionados can also immerse themselves into a 360-degree dimension. With a headset only, they can experience virtual reality.
“It is a nice experience. It feels very real. It is quite similar to videos. Besides, it is in high definition so you feel that you are really living what they tell you that you will see. It is great,” says first-time user Nicolas Nieves.
How you ever had your face scanned and printed in 3D?
The 3D printing innovation allows you to make anything you want with inexpensive printers – even yourself in multiple dimensions.
Here, 20 3D scanners take a 360-degree pictures of a guest before the person’s portrait is then digitized.
The InternetExpoLA event gives prominence to Latin America’s latest technologies on the international stage.
Martin Todres, the event’s organiser, is confident about the region’s potential:
“I believe that there are a lot of foreign companies that are looking at what we are doing here. Sometimes, for the sake of time and cost-efficiency, these foreign companies can develop faster (here) and be on the market quicker but the original idea comes from this region (Latin America). A lot of investors are looking at the region because there is a lot of knowledge and talent.”
Amongst the most creative talent, three students from Argentine universities came up with an original idea: software to control drones following the motion of their hands.
Facing a 360’s Kinect motion sensor machine, they move their hands to guide the drone in the air – instead of remotely piloting it.
Anna Laura Perez Cerrato, a first-year student in Computers Science at the University of Buenos Aires, explains how the pilot project works:
“The (project’s) innovation comes from control. Right now, drones can only be controlled with remote controls like analogue joysticks. What we do is that we connect the drone to a gestural interface so I can control the drone by moving my arms up and down.”
To get a taste of a world where artificial intelligence is taking over, the government of Buenos Aires introduced in July 2015 a project for autonomous vehicles.
A possible solution to traffic accidents, the vehicles have no steering wheel and no driver.
89 year old visitor Katy Todres never thought she would live long enough to experience something like this:
“The last thing I thought was that I would ever have the opportunity to get into this (type of) car. At first, it scared me a bit because there are no doors so you feel that you are going to fall. But I was in safe hands so it relaxed me. It was very interesting, very nice and a great experience,” she says.
The world is now bracing for an era of limitless connectivity. The Internet of Things – or the connection of all physical objects to the Internet – is underway.
From machine-to-machine communication to cloud computing, ExpoInternetLA is showing how technology has the potential to improve our daily lives.
Horacio Werner, Senior Director at Cisco Systems, explains how big data can save us.
“This great amount of data allows us to not only understand what is going on but also to link it with what happened. It also enables us to predict the future. If we think about this temporal dynamics, this allows us to think about the multiple uses this (big data) can have. I can think of concrete examples in Latin America: in the catastrophe centre in the city of Rio (de Janeiro, Brazil), with sensors, we can measure the amount of rain and soil displacement but also, based on the amount of rain and historical records, we can predict floods,” he says.
To become a tech leader, Werner says the region has still some progress to make.
“In Latin America, what needs to be done is to better structure innovation. Innovation is an important part but without execution, it does not have much value. In reality, our countries in the region have the important task to improve the infrastructure around, enhance the capacity to start businesses quickly in terms of bureaucracy and of course (improve) the financing capacity,” he adds.
More than 2,000 people attended the first day of the exhibition, according to the organisers’ figures.
About 50,000 curious minds are expected over the four day event which also involves International speakers like Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak.
ExpoInternetLA is taking place from September 9 to September 12, 2015.
This video was produced exclusively for Associated Press on September 11, 2015. Click here to watch it.
