Paper-thin speakers blare pop music. 3D films appear on elongated screens with no need for special viewing glasses. Viewers’ pulses turn cocoons into butterflies in an interactive display.
Welcome to the Pavilion of Dreams, a high-tech enclave within the Taipei International Flora Exposition, where Taiwanese artists and engineers are using technology-generated flowers and plants to strut the nation’s cutting edge know-how to onlookers from around the world.
The exposition, which runs through April, has so far drawn more than 1.9 million visitors to the expansive site.
Already recognized as a supplier of smartphone and computer components to global technology companies, Taiwan wants to use the pavilion to highlight its capacity for product innovation in the increasingly competitive high-tech world, said Hsueh Wen-chen (薛文珍), head of the government-funded creativity center that designed the popular pavilion.
“Taiwan is not so well-known for creating technologies because we use them mainly in making parts and components for consumer products,” she said. “Here we let our imaginations run wild in a way that can give us ideas about how to meet consumer needs when we design our products.”
Visitors to the pavilion are greeted by a 3.5 tonne artificial flower hanging from the ceiling. It opens and folds its petals to the rhythm of pop music blared from scores of palm-sized speakers, cut into leaf shapes to merge with their surroundings. The speakers are made from a thin, flexible metal coated with a vibrating membrane with strategically placed sensors.
In an adjacent exhibition room, a row of 65-inch flat screens runs 3D animated films of flowers and plants that visitors can view without special glasses because the screens have been engineered to display something known as lenticular imaging.
Just around the corner, a wall of 3m tall liquid crystal glass panels — looking like a giant transparent bowl — shows a lifelike projection of flowers in the wild.
Unlike conventional flat designs, the 18 panels are curved to create a stunning visual effect. Engineers changed the properties of the membrane attached to the glass so light permeates the curved surface evenly — just like it does on the flat screen version.
Perhaps most impressive of all, a nearby amphitheater shows a film about flora and fauna in a deeply forested environment that allows viewers to transform a small plant into a large tree by breathing onto the screen, or turn a cocoon into a butterfly by placing their wrists near the screen and letting their pulses do the work.
The apparently magical effect is accomplished by using ultra-wide bands (UWB), a radio technology first developed at a Russian lab to register life signs in human beings without making physical contact.
“Taiwan is now adapting the UWB technology for medical and other uses,” said Yuan Nai-chuan (袁乃川), chief program producer at the pavilion. “We thought it would work very nicely here, too.”
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods