This year’s South By Southwest Interactive conference came to an end Tuesday, March 17.
The five-day convention took place in Austin, Texas and included six different ceremonies honoring some of the world’s most forward-thinking individuals and companies. This year saw hundreds of technological innovations. Some of the 2015 Interactive Innovation Award Winners are:
VocaliD (Health and Med Tech)
VocaliD allows users to blend the voice of a healthy talker with the voice of a disorder talker to create a voice that is understandable but is unique to the person the voice is being built for. According to www.vocalid.co, the technology combines the recipient’s voice characteristics with a database of speech recordings from a matched donor. The result is a hybrid voice that preserves the clarity of the donor’s recordings but conveys as much of the recipients vocal identity as possible. All that’s needed to be a voice donor is an internet connection, a microphone and a quiet room.
FireChat (Innovation in Connecting People)
FireChat is an app that splits the difference between texting and Twitter. The app allows you to communicate with friends privately or expand into large, public real-time chat rooms. What makes FireChat unique is its ability to function even if there’s no internet available. It connects with other nearby devices via Bluetooth to make its own network. For example, fans at a concert, demonstrators at a protest, or students in a class room can all connect and chat together in one closed location in real-time.
Cone (Music Discovery)
Cone is a smart music player device that “learns what you like to listen to and then plays it.” It gives the user access to Rdio’s library of over 30 million songs, over 25,000 podcasts from Stitcher, plus thousands of radio stations. Cone allows users to never have to stop and search for music again. You can control Cone using voice requests and the front dial, but a companion app is available for Apple devices, and Android phones. Users can connect multiple Cones together for perfect synchronization.
Apart from the winners there are many more innovations that are attracting significant attention:
AeroMobil 3.0
It’s a flying car. According to aeromobil.com, as a car it fits into any standard parking space, uses regular gasoline and can be used in road traffic just like any other car. As a plane, it can use any airport in the world, but can also take off and land using any grass strip or paved surface just a few hundred meters long. According to ABC News and the AeroMobil website, this two person vehicle tops off at 99 mph on the road and around 124mph in the sky. The company says buyers can expect to pay somewhere in the six figures for the first edition. This flying car could be on the road and in the skies as early as 2017.
Gear Virtual Reality Innovator Edition
Compatible with the 5.1-inch Super AMOLED display on the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, Samsung Mobile claims their Gear VR Innovator Edition gives its users a fully immersive virtual reality experience. According to MSN.com, the device offers reduced pixilation, a wide field of view and a more comfortable design, providing the user with a better VR experience. According to business.newsfactor.com, the updated VR headset was reduced in size by 15 percent to make it more comfortable to wear and now features improved imaging and a USB power chord port for longer usage times.
For a more complete list of SXSW winners, finalists, and participants, visit www.sxsw.com/interactive.
