Yesterday we were lucky enough to be invited to Gadget Show Live 2011 at Birmingham NEC, the UK’s ultimate consumer electronics show which is now in its third year and more successful than ever!
Here at Mobile Fun we often help out the Gadget Show on C5 with quality kit for them to take a butchers at – we even had the very lovely Otis & Suzi filming in our warehouse the other month!
If you’ve never been to Gadget Show Live, hopefully this blog post should give you a bit of a flavour. It takes place over 5 days within several enormous halls at the NEC, all stuffed to the brim with everything the gadget and gaming geek could ever want. There’s also a dedicated Gaming Zone, giving you sneak-peaks at the latest and upcoming games – all accompanied by the tinkling sound of tunes from Zelda and Final Fantasy being played on a grand piano. Lovely stuff.
We found some cool bits and pieces for tablets and smartphones, which we got the lowdown on, and I’ll be posting on in a few follow-up blogs in more detail – there’s a lot of exciting stuff coming up for the iPad 2, of course, and a huge variety of iPad 2 skins and covers, some of which we’ll be getting our mitts on as stock in the near future!
Laura, our Online Blogger Liaison, tried her hand at a spot of 3D gaming with NVIDIA 3D vision, which gives you the ultimate 3D experience right at your fingertips on your desktop or notepad. As they had specially-designed moving seats at the show it was a bit of a bumpy ride on the racing game she tried! Here she is enjoying herself – or more accurately, crashing the car every two minutes and screaming quite a lot.
I had a bit of a science fiction moment playing on Neurosky’s mind control games, which made me feel like I’d stepped straight into an Asimov novel. Neurosky’s Mindwave Headset is the EEG headset that’s available for the commercial market, and measures brainwaves from the forehead with pinpoint medical accuracy – now that’s really brain-training! They’ve got a variety of fun and educational games, and I had a go on the archery simulator, where you have to attempt to score a bullseye by altering your brainwaves. The Mindwave measures how much attention you’re paying, and how relaxed you’re feeling, so repeated use can train you to become better at both focus and relaxation – both very handy life-skills which I’ll be trying those out around the office!
We also particularly liked a device called the Sound Driver, which lets you transform a flat surface such as a desk or table into an amplifying device to make your music really pump – sounds a bit weird, but it was very impressive! We also saw a lot of flat panel DML speakers which disguise themselves as canvas pictures, so that your room is full of music but not full of unsightly wires and clunky speakers.
A lot of the gadgets around the show gave us a great glimpse into the home of the future, from rubbish bins with sensors that detect when to open and close, to adapters that let you control your lighting, heating and electrical equipment using any web-based smartphone. We even spotted The Gadget Show’s Suzi and Jon taking filming a very cute-looking robotic lawnmower!
One robot who wasn’t quite so cute was the enormous Titan, who caused a stir wherever he went by suddenly launching himself into the crowd. Here’s some video that we caught of him trying to chat up a poor innocent old lady – who reciprocated by stroking his face with a cleaning cloth!
Stay tuned for a closer look at some of the cool gadgets we took a look at, particularly iPad 2 accessories and iPhone accessories!