MacWorld NY 2002 was boring, to say the least. It was always good to catch up with old friends, but even most of them weren't in attendance. Granted, MacWorld in New York is a far different beast than the San Francisco version (or Tokyo or Boston, for that matter). But what I found was a completely uninspiring lack of cool things.
I was one of the first people in line to buy an Eye TV box, which purports to be "Tivo for the Macintosh". To their credit, they did a nice job supporting OS X. To their detriment, it doesn't seem to work with any Mac I've plugged it into (G4 AGP, iBook, flat iMac) and I have to assume my unit is DOA. Now we get to test how good their tech support is.
I saw exactly one other cool piece of technology. A small start-up called CyberExtruder had a very compelling piece of software that could take a simple 2D picture of your face, taken with a digital camera, and in a matter of seconds it could be rendered into a 3D model of your head. The effect was amazing and the transformation from 2D to 3D was quite impressive. While I think their business model leaves room for improvement (selling 3D models for first person shooters and cell phones), if they move it into the security space, they have a huge market. Imagine being able to generate reasonably good 3D biometrics from 2D mug shots, millions of which already exist on-line. Certainly makes picking that bad guy out of a crowd much easier.
In any event, it was worth the trip if for no other reason than to connect with old friends. The show wasn't that compelling, but as usual, all the people surrounding it were.
8:53:16 AM 
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