Mr Vic Hayes at IIT Techfest (also pictured Dr Alessandra)
Special thanks to Aditya Sengupta [@sengupta (Blog)] for the interview on behalf of OnlyGizmos
Before attending Lars Rasmussen’s lecture, we attended what turned out to be one of the more technical lectures at Techfest 2010. The ‘Father of Wi-Fi’, Mr. Vic Hayes is a very unassuming man, going so far as to insist that the organizers call him Mister instead of Doctor as was mentioned on the official schedule and posters. We caught up with him before his lecture and asked him a couple of questions. (video below)
He explained how the motivation for WiFi- known then simply as IEEE 802.11- a wireless technical standard- was to enable cash registers to be placed anywhere in retail stores without having to lug wires around each time the floor plan was changed. 802.11 was made possible when the FCC approved spectrum for general use without requiring end user licenses (compare that to the brouhaha over the 3G spectrum licenses). The ubiquitous 2.45GHz frequency radio band- which is used in devices ranging from cordless phones to microwave ovens soon came to connect people across the world in what we are more familiar as WiFi.
He talked about the challenges he faced convincing companies to get on the same page- particularly in an environment where every manufacturer wanted to push its own standards. He then explained the need for the “WiFi” trademark as something distinct from the IEEE 802.11 standard- with a rare jab of humour at how the first press release for (more…)
If the internal IITB exhibitions rocked this year the international exhibitions were no less and pretty much upto the mark compared to the previous versions. There were many innovative and advanced technologies at display (read James Bond style technology if that helps your imagination). Ranging from nanobots to underwater robots (fishes and lobsters), from 3-D simulations of earthquakes to amazing solar powered racing cars, this year had it all.
Gwawr – The solar car
This beautiful welsh named car Gwawr meaning dawn was one of the attractions of the international exhibitions at the Techfest @IITB this year. Also a winner of the Panasonic World Solar Challenge Environmental Awareness Award 2007 not only because it runs on green fuel but also due to the fact that most of it is made from recycled materials resulting in almost zero carbon emissions when when the car is scrapped.
The car at display wasn’t the original one, but a scaled down model which was powered by electricity for now. Prof. Graham and Tom built it in 9 days for the exhibition. The actual car is a dual powered one which can be charged via both, Yeah! you guessed it, electricity and solar power. The scaled down model at the exhibition could do 25mph (because it had got Prof. Graham’s bicycle motor attached to it). The braking system was also adopted from the bicycle itself. While onlygizmos was lucky enough to get an exclusive video of Tom (future Schumacher for his sheer driving skills) driving the car. I was even more luckier to get a chance to get into the car.
Natures Raincoat
Although the name had us guessing and all we could think of was something associated with rains. But this one was something very different that we have seen for a while. On display were super hydrophobic material that repelled water as the opposites of a magnet repel each other.
We had the magic sand at display which came out as dry as it can be in a super hot desert even after immersing in water. Then there was this special coated business card which left no traces o water even after you drop water on it. They also used a ducks wing to display the same. This phenomenon was explained by pressing a blown ballon on the surface of a bed of nails which even if you pressed hard would not be pierced by the nails and not burst. It so happens that the surfce is such that pressure of the drop gets equally distributed on the surface as a result of which water does not break in to the surface and is bounced off the surface leaving it untouched by water. I know its difficult to understand but Ubercool stuff isnt it?
Quantum of solace
As the name suggests this was indeed an amazingly sophisticated display of state of the art technology straight out of the Bond flick (more…)
Having watched his infamous 80 minute Google Wave demo twice over- we sure were looking forward to see the man in real life. And the man did not disappoint. Using his distinctive wit, he quipped, “I always start my lectures with my computer crashing”, when his computer refused to light up. The prospect of a BSOD on a Google guy’s Microsoft XP amused me thoroughly, but a prospect it remained and the lecture began.
He ran through the important features of Google Wave during the lecture for benefit of those who hadn’t seen his demo earlier. He talked about the Indian connection of Google Maps- how a substantial amount of the development work and innovation had happened at Google’s Bangalore office. He handled numerous technical and organizational snags with his characteristic sense of humour- what with his VPN not working (“so you’ll just have to imagine what it looked like”) and an IITian having to hold up a mike while he was typing after his collar mike died.
It was our third year at the Techfest and the 72hours at IIT Bombay would certainly be remembered as one my best outings for OnlyGizmos. Over the years I have seen the same journalists and students attending sessions and competitions, just a testimony of the fact as to how addictive the Techfest is. And we must admit while it is tough covering the Techfest on all three days (even with a 5 member team), we find ourselves privileged to have such jobs. A treat for technology enthusiasts it is for sure!
1. Interview with Dr Lars Rasmussen, Co-founder Google Wave – Live Now
2. International Exhibitions at Techfest 2010
3. Interview with Dr Lyn Evans
4. Many more videos and exclusive pictures – Track Flickr / YouTube
Forced advertisement: While we housed team at the great roomno368 over the weekend to get you the latest and the best from Techfest 2010, there was just one source of inspiration igniting the fire of our will power to give Techfest what it deserves … A big thank you to Lara aka @vivekk !!
One of the geekiest setups we saw at the Techfest was for FreeKick. Each participating team had to make 2 autonomous bots that reside on a (mini) football field against its opponents and four plastic balls. Whichever bot scores the maximum goals wins. Simple! But not that easy as it sounds. The bots have no cameras or map loaded on them to known the location of the balls or the size / dimension of the ground. Both teams get a feed from an overhead webcamera and their algorithms have to read the location of the balls from the ground and communicate to the bots. The 4-5 fps at which the feed is delivered to the bots is more than enough for them to play a live football match.
However calibrating the bots to the lighting at the event location was itself a challenge for many teams (20 mins is provided for the same). We spent close to an hour over there, hoping to see some action, but the bots took just too much time for calibration. Nevertheless its nice to see such complex ones amongst the mechanical Full Throttle and Robowars.
“It is not whether you win or lose, but how much you learn that counts!”
After the regular gaming zone Techfest this year came up with a live and interactive game called Lazer Tag. All you had to do was wear the sensor laded suit attached with a deadly Laser gun that would put even the Starwars guys to shame. Once you were ready Bond style, you were put into a dark room full of barriers to cover yourself; in 3 teams of 4 each. Your mission was to shoot the opposition and collect as many points as possible. You shoot in the front you get 50, you shoot at back you get 100 points. For once we proved that Skyn3t is a bad gamer ( ) who finished 9th with a mere accuracy of 8.5%. Although the game lasted only 8 minutes, it was good enough to send you in a tizzy with your heart beat pumping. After personally experiencing this breath taking game, we are confident it will take the gamers by the feet and in no time they would be addicted to it. Its time we say Adios to Counter Strike. Bye -Bye.
Although this one is a regular at the Techfest since years. Till date this has been one of the most popular of all captivating the audience and keeping them engaged from dusk till dawn. Like every year these robotic demons were placed in a glass cage, not to protect them but to save the audience from their destructive capabilities. The external powered robots competed against each other for a limited time in which they had to destroy the other. This year the panel of judges were from Robosoft. Each contest had the crowd going wild with enthusiasm and taking teams, cheering them.
Below is a video of one of the exciting contest. (more…)
The IITB internal exhibition rocked this year and are as good as the international exhibitions. Can’t believe it then you need to see it. Oh you didn’t, then you can see the images of all the individual exhibits right here and read about them. These exhibits mostly consisted either of power saving concepts or generating green energy.
I personally loved the solar lamp and the solar panel array. The solar lamp uses power LEDs instead of CFLs; consuming very low power. These lamps can be charged via AC and solar power and are already being used in the rural villages. The solar array panels are fitted with highly reflective aluminum sheets. These sheets help increase the intensity of the light and hence increases the power generation capacity of the panels by almost 60% thereby elevating the efficiency of the panels. The solar panel array will soon be tested in Delhi and might be commercialized (more…)
Another regular like the Full throttle, this one event has caught the imagination of the IITians. They seem to be not only enjoying it but also getting addicted to it at the same time. Probably one of the reasons they progressed it from just gliding these planes to using motors and propellers to fly them. You must have seen people flying these custom made planes which are normally very clumsy and do not have great controls. But to my surprise the ones used in this competition had amazing controls and full credit goes to the flyers of these planes. They performed breathtaking maneuvers enthralling the audience. I must admit that even I was captivated by these high flying planes and was lost in my own world looking at them. We managed to get a detailed video of one of the high flyers who did very well in the competition and is one of the (more…)
The NDRF (National Disaster Rescue Force) is currently doing a High Rise Rescue Demo at Techfest Day 3 and here we have the live video and pictures for you.
Utkarsh was one of the events of Prayaas (Techfest 2010), an effort for a better tomorrow. This competition gave a platform to the entrepreneurs and their innovations. The participants had to explain their concept along with a scaled model of the actual working model of their innovation. Based on the theme the students came up with briquettes with zero pollution with the help of filters attached to it. Other students came up with different kinds of Chullahs that give you a higher efficiency than others (about 30%). Both claimed that the other wasn’t viable and commercially not implementable. Some other innovations included charging gadgets with the help of dynamos attached to the bicycle. Noticeable was the fact that the students had done thorough research on their projects and the presentations were not that good (understandably though). Overall I was impressed with the ideas and the effort put into the detailing of each project. Such initiatives will definitely help build a better future for the rural villages.
If you are any regular at the IIT Techfest, you would be used to all the terms such as Technololix or Lecture Series, but this year a new segment added to the techfest is “Scintillations”. Proving that we are out of recession there are things in Scintillations like the Eiffel Tower, that does little more than telling us that we are out of recession . On a serious note Scintillations gives you some marvels of technology. Lets see what we had at this new segment @ Techfest 2010. (more…)
While the Full throttle inferno was a battle of speed and a show of strength (like many other competitions including Blackbird, Robowars etc) these little and relatively inexpensive ships has just one goal – run without any batteries! Yes ladies and gentlemen, the ships had a propeller but no batteries to run them. The contestants had to rely on the 500watt fuse that hangs over the water track to extract solar energy from and use that to run race their boats.
Most ships were made from thermacol or plastic (however we caught an innovative one with stress balls put to good use) with one or more solar panel attached to the top. Most boats were able to draw the power and sail initially, but as soon as they reached a part of the track that lies between two light focuses (that means the direct light from the bulb not coming over the ship) quite a few of them stopped (more…)
FTGP as it was known a couple of years back, this is an annual event at the Techfest. IC engine powered, aluminum cars race across the muddy track and each time they zip through a corner, they remind me of my dirt biking days. The heartbeat of a race and the musical sound of engine is thrilling. Certainly making this one of the must watch at the IIT Techfest 2010, heck – I have been saying that for almost all competitions!
The teams are allowed to source the IC engine and a few allied chips together, however the game lies in the aluminum structure of the car that decides the handling. Controlling the remote is another art and the real challenge lies in giving the best lap times. There are a few who keep crashing across the borders, while some just zip through flying off the bumps. Most cars cost roughly (more…)
Special thanks to @sengupta (Blog) for the interview on behalf of OnlyGizmos
Dr. Ajay Bhatt certainly knows how to use self deprecatory humour well. He began his lecture by screening this clip of him trying to emulate the rockstar image portrayed by the actor playing him in the famous “Our rockstars aren’t like your rockstars” ad.
Though Dr. Ajay Bhatt is the co-inventor of the USB, his lecture at IITB’s TechFest focused primarily on the future of mobile computing. He emphasized the “Complete Mobile Experience” as being one that balances performance, ease of use, software and internet compatibility, battery life, new form factors and connectivity.
He introduced new developments such as Intel’s Turbo Boost- a mechanism that turns off some of the CPU/GPU cores when not required; My WiFi- using WiFi in an ad-hoc mode without the need of an access point; and cooling laptop cores using a jet of air inspired by jet engine technology.
He ended the lecture- as he began- on a hilarious note. He compared Moore’s Law to the automotive industry- saying that if Moore’s Law were applicable to the automotive industry, cars today would cost Rs. 1.36, run at a top speed of 292,044kmph and have a fuel efficiency of 42,514km/l.
We caught up with Dr. Bhatt after the lecture for a short chat. Since he didn’t dwell much on USB, we asked him a couple of questions regarding the topic- particularly the upcoming USB 3.0. We asked him why Intel isn’t pushing it harder considering the work it’s put in. We also talked about Light Peak, his advice for students keen on following his path, wireless charging, multicore computing, the challenges he faced in pushing USB forward and why he doesn’t appear in the Intel Rockstar ads.
This event is one of the main features of Techfest and like every year this time as well it attracted huge amount of crowd in gigantic proportions. The crowd bustling in, exciting vibes and the resultant chaos and noise; it just seemed like other times until something not very usual happened. We had a female compering the Technoholix (Day 1) and that’s a first we saw in our three years of coverage of the fest. It certainly got the crowd very excited. Unfortunately she wasn’t really prepared and shockingly was reading her lines from a sheet of paper (at snails pace I must say) much to the disappointment of the audience.
Now the audience (so did we) had a lot of expectations from the Activ8 3D show. But it ended up rather being more of a 2D show much to the chagrin of the crowd which had already got uneasy due to the delayed start of the event (it started at 8.25 instead of the usual 7.15). An interesting character in the form of a disciple of Baba Ramdev kept the audience occupied for some time (this character delivered a lot of 3 idiots dialogue and gave a brief about the lives of engineers at the same time) which had started to grow weary after the long wait and the show was proving to be way below their expectations.
Come in M.A.D mountain bike stunt team. They not only managed to cheer up the crowd but also got them going again (more…)
I have just returned after a good 18 hour coverage of the IIT Techfest 2010 Day 1 and the last event I attended was the screening of this Documentary / Movie – The Age of Stupid. While in another 6 5 hours I am supposed to be running around the IIT B campus again going wild over the live coverage challenge that the OG Team has taken up, there is something I couldn’t held back within myself – and that’s the desire to make a difference!
IIT Techfest 2010 is bigger than ever before and the Day 1 is full of addictive enthusiasm and amazing energy. Enough for the 6 member OG team to skip lunch and keep hunting for those exclusive footage that we are uploading since morning. By far the highest crowd drawer is the lecture by Dr Ajay Bhatt, the co-inventor of the USB (such was the response from the audience that he had to give back to back lectures) and the ISRO / NDMA (National Defense Management Authority) exhibitions. Not to forget the amazing Heli rescue demo by Natural Disaster Rescue Force. (more…)
There is always a calm before the arrival of the actual storm. People believe that the IIT is all calm before the events actually kickstarts. But hey! This is certainly not the case; its much more chaotic, wilder and crazier than it looks from the outside. The OnlyGizmos team is all set to bring you the latest and the best from the IIT Techfest 2010 (just like we did for the last two years). Here are a couple of cool videos of the MAD Mountbike Stunt Performance(on day zero) that you are going to see at the IIT B Techfest this weekend. Also don’t forget to tune into our live Techfest page for instant updates on the event days between 22nd – 24th Jan.
Mr Vic Hayes at IIT Techfest (also pictured Dr Alessandra)
) who finished 9th with a mere accuracy of 8.5%. Although the game lasted only 8 minutes, it was good enough to send you in a tizzy with your heart beat pumping. After personally experiencing this breath taking game, we are confident it will take the gamers by the feet and in no time they would be addicted to it. Its time we say Adios to Counter Strike. Bye -Bye.
