Smart Cities NYC ’17 is drawing 2,000 attendees from 30 countries for four days of talks and demos for the stated mission of making the urban world “safer, smarter, more efficient, and more inclusive.” The planners had to be pretty smart themselves to orchestrate the intellectually sprawling event, not incidentally in Brooklyn, just as the borough is raising its profile in the conference business. “It’s very gratifying to see it all come together,” said Raj Pannu, CEO of Emergence Creative, one of the groups organizing the show. “It started out as a back-of-the-cocktail-napkin idea” two years ago, he said.
When viewed through the mixed-reality Microsoft HoloLens, the skyline of Seattle comes into three-dimensional view. Powered by software from Taqtile, the city view can be overlaid with all sorts of information, including real-time traffic patterns, weather forecasts, and geo-tagged Twitter feeds. Dirck Schou, co-founder of Seattle-based Taqtile, demonstrated how multiple users could collaborate in real time viewing the same 3D experience. The company deployed its technology for a golf app (above) and a project with the Cleveland Cavaliers to create a virtual holographic walkthrough of proposed renovations to the Quicken Loans Arena.