Inside one of many loudly adorned trailers parked outside the World Financial Center’s Winter Garden Thursday, Mary-Beth Karabinos guided guests to a glass mannequin wearing a large headset. From either side of the headpiece, sleek metal arms with rubber end-pieces gripped the glass head in apparently calculated intervals. This gadget, explained Karabinos, a field coordinator with GMR Marketing, could soon add new meaning to the phrase “will-to-power” as a user must simply think a command (“change the channel,” for example), and it is fulfilled. Using brainwave-sensing technology that has existed for years in medical research, this new-age remote control is Best Buy’s latest prototype.
Until last week Lower Manhattan was not a target for showcasing this sort of cutting-edge consumer technology. But with last week’s arrival of Digital Downtown, Lower Manhattan’s largest-ever free consumer technology showcase, at the World Financial Center, this dynamic may be changing. Noting that Las Vegas has long monopolized consumer technology conventions, some say that Lower Manhattan could soon become its East Coast counterpart in the industry of showing off new technology.
“We were really blown away by the turnout,” Martin Porter, a coordinator of Digital Downtown said in a phone interview. “Thirty major brands got to see the power of the Downtown community — its affluence and influence,” Porter added. Though figures are not available for the event’s attendance, Porter said that the Best Buy exhibit, which counts its guests, broke all of its attendance records while parked outside the World Financial Center last week.
Porter said that the show will not only become a new annual event in Lower Manhattan, but will hopefully expand exponentially. “Our target is to triple exhibits by next year,” Porter said. “We’ll be back and we’ll be bigger.”
When asked whether he thought Digital Downtown would transform Downtown into the East Coast equivalent of Las Vegas’s consumer technology shows, Porter said “I think I it will, there’s no question about it.”
Of those featured last week, Porter said the Pioneer exhibit was one of the most popular. Hosted in a tent inside which the entire ceiling screened a rotating animation and beats emanated from a DJ platform, the Pioneer installation exhibited the latest in car technology. A Smart Car parked in the tent and decked out with most of the exhibit’s features was of particular interest to the tent’s guests. After a several-minute wait in line, Jaed Arzadom, a Pioneer exhibitor, stepped into the driver’s seat and flicked to life two three-inch LCD screens, one on the dashboard, the other suspended from the windshield.
While the lower screen played an action movie, Arzadom focused intently on a map displayed on the top screen. With the push of a button, the map zoomed into a 3-D representation of the World Financial Center’s atrium, a blue block between two larger, gray blocks. “We are there,” Arzadom said, pointing to the atrium’s patio.
— James S. Woodman
