The 2010 Taipei International Gardening and Horticulture Exposition will amaze the world with Taiwan’s pioneering technologies, Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bing (郝龍斌) said yesterday.
The expo, to be held for the first time in Taiwan from Nov. 6 next year to April 25, 2011 will bring international players in the industry together. It will be the first internationally recognized exposition to take place in Taipei, and the seventh of its kind to take place in Asia. Taipei City estimates that the event will attract 6 million visitors.
“The expo will not only showcase Taiwan’s outstanding achievements in gardening and biotechnology to the world but also serve as a great opportunity to market Taiwan and Taipei, as we are a high-tech country and city,” Hau said at a news conference to unveil the design and concept of the expo’s Pavilion of Dreams.
The pavilion will showcase Taiwan’s latest technologies, featuring five of the most advanced patent technologies developed by the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI, 工研院), which is in charge of designing the pavilion.
The technologies include a 1mm flexible speaker, a naked-eye 3D display, ultra-high radio frequency identification (RFID), ultra wideband (UWB) touch-free physiologic detection and an electro-controlled flexible chromic LCD panel, ITRI said.
“The Pavilion of Dreams, will feature the most cutting-edge technology of the expo’s 14 pavilions, and no doubt leave every visitor with beautiful memories of an unforgettable experience,” Hau said.
With Taiwan’s advanced digital technologies, sensor technology and interactive technologies, visitors to the pavilion will enjoy a unique audio and sensory experience, the Taipei City government said.
Visitors to the pavilion will be greeted by a 6m wide mechanical flower installation and a forest tunnel with leaves made of ultra-thin flexible speakers to imitate the sounds of nature.
Putting on an RFID bangle when they enter the pavilion to start recording their movements and experiences, visitors will also be able to interact with a 360° real-time panoramic theater that will be equipped with the world’s first UWB touch-free physiological detection machine to gauge visitors’ heartbeats and transform the data into fast-moving images on a screen.
Before leaving, visitors will be asked to scan their RFID bangles to have a computer create a unique “dream flower” that will be planted in the “city garden,” leaving a mark of their visit to the pavilion, the ITRI said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained