NAGOYA, Japan -- A smartly dressed, flesh-tone female receptionist robot greets and directs visitors with blinks and hand gestures, fielding questions in four languages. Fuel-cell hybrid buses ferry passengers, driverless, between buildings constructed with bioplastics and reused steel, their facades enveloped by plants and cascading water for natural cooling. Diners eat rice bowls and curries using biodegradable utensils, which are composted or burned at high temperatures to feed fuel cells for on-site power.
This vision of an eco-utopia is made real at the 2005 World Expo, an international exhibition of new technologies and global culture running through Sept. 25 outside Nagoya, Japan.
The expo, expected to draw 15 million visitors, continues a long tradition of World's Fairs as showcases for new technological frontiers. The steam engine, telephone, fluorescent lighting, the television -- even the hamburger -- were all innovations unveiled at fairs past.
This year's exhibition, however, paints a brave new technological world sensitive to the planet. Amid the flashy, next-generation technologies, one of the expo's main sideshows -- the curly tusks and head of an 18,000-year-old frozen woolly mammoth, freshly excavated from the Siberian tundra -- acts as a sobering, if not slightly incongruous, reminder of a species gone extinct from rising temperatures.
The expo is a rich display of technological optimism. Toyota Motor, based near the expo and a major sponsor of the $3 billion event, developed a convoy of next-generation vehicles that meander, driverless, through the 427-acre site that was -- and will remain after the event -- a nature park. Zero-emissions buses, combining the Toyota Prius' hybrid technology with hydrogen fuel cells, shuttle between the 130-plus country and corporate pavilions clustered into a half-dozen "global commons" areas. Encircling the site, an elevated walkway constructed with wood-chip "pavement" serves as the main pedestrian artery for the more than 80,000 average daily visitors.
Gawkers and geeks will be wowed by the expo's array of "world's firsts." Coming soon to theaters: a state-of-the-art laser projection system that delivers images on a megawide, 50 meter-by-10 meter screen. A super HD image system, developed by Japan's public broadcasting corporation, NHK, plays scenes of Earth on a 600-inch screen with 3-D acoustics. At Mitsubishi's pavilion, a special-effects theater combines images, mirrors and sounds in a hexagonal space, while at Japan's own pavilion, a 360-degree, all-sky spherical theater surrounds viewers in sea and sky imagery.
Elsewhere, the world's largest kaleidoscope rises monolithically from the expo grounds, while the world's smallest "oxygenated nanobubbles" allow saltwater red snapper and freshwater carp to inhabit the same fish tank. Japan Railway shows off its superconducting, magnetically levitated bullet train that reaches top speeds of 361 mph, which will require even faster shutter speeds for Japan's ubiquitous Mount Fuji tourism photos.
Visitors queued at the Mitsui-Toshiba pavilion to await a glimpse of the potential future of computer gaming. The company's Futurecast System photographs visitors' faces and renders the images within minutes into the characters of computer-generated sci-fi shorts.
In a country where cute mascots and fantastical characters are pop-cultural icons, the robot prototypes demonstrated at the expo are, not surprisingly, a big draw for the thousands of camera-phone-toting visitors. At Toyota's wind-powered pavilion, a troupe of robots plays jazz instruments in a 30-minute show, while humans lumber around bioplastic-carpeted corridors from the clamshell seats of bipedal I-foot robots.
Dozens of the most practical service robots, poised for market by 2015, are showcased at the pavilion run by NEDO, Japan's quasi-governmental agency responsible for developing industrial, environmental and energy-conservation technologies.
In the future world according to NEDO, outdoor cleaning robots with autonomous moving and garbage-carrying capabilities will work city streets or remove snow. Surgical robots equipped with 3-D stereoscopic video microscopes will assist doctors in delicate procedures, and intelligent autonomous wheelchairs, using GPS and IC tags, will carry the disabled. Various household robots with voice- and face-recognition technology will care for children, help with household chores and secure our homes. And home-run-hitting robots will be able to connect with 100 mph pitches to assist professional ballplayers.
The 120 country pavilions presented at the expo offer a more human rendering of the future planet, with interactive displays, rides and art installations. Nepal has recreated an elaborate Buddhist temple to display Himalayan life and culture, and Switzerland houses a 30-foot mountain ringed by thematic rooms. (The United States screens a multimedia presentation on Benjamin Franklin to honor the innovator's 300th birthday). At the NGO exhibits, the Toilet Exploration Pavilion demonstrates the toilet haves -- and have-nots -- across the globe.
Access to the expo site from Nagoya is by Japan's first maglev train, the Linimo. More information can be found at the expo's website.
