This year, the Automated Imaging Association’s “THE Vision Show” took to the road and ended up in Phoenix, AZ. This show for some years was the every-other-year “West” vision show, and had most frequently been held in the San Jose/Santa Clara area. It’s sister show has been held in the East in Boston on alternating years. Not trying to get into historical detail or why the show was in Phoenix; I just want to point out that the show is pretty well established regardless of location.
Even before it opened last week, CW was that the show would be horribly slow. One of my industry friends and well known machine vision pundit opined that his plane might be able to land in The Vision Show aisles upon arrival. Here’s my take on the show:
I gave two tutorial sessions on Monday at the opening conference. While the sessions were more sparsely attended than at some previous events, what I found interesting was that the attendees were all relatively new to machine vision, and seemed to have serious interest in implementing the technology for actual applications. I think that whenever we reach new people, we have achieved success in promoting future competent use of machine vision technology and that’s a positive for everyone.
On to the show floor. Yes, it was quite slow. And I found it unfortunate that some key manufacturers were not present at the show. Yet I got some value out of the show itself nonetheless. I’ve always viewed The Vision Shows as component shows (as opposed to The International Robots & Vision/Motion Control Show, which I feel has more of an “applications” or “solutions” flavor.) I walked the show with the specific purpose of finding new or updated components that might be interesting to my customers, useful in my applications, or just fun to learn about. In this sense I was not disappointed. There actually were plenty of things that were either new in the past several months, or which I had not previously had a chance to be “hands-on” with since the last trade show. In particular, I got some in-depth information about short-wavelength IR cameras, new high-intensity line lights, some large-format optics that I hadn’t previously known about, and a 3D scanning point-cloud camera that I had not seen demonstrated before.
One of the highlights for me was the demonstration of Andy Long’s (Cyth Systems) machine-vision-based automated “Guitar Hero” playing machine. It’s been to various shows, but this was the first time I had seen it up close. I tried my hand at the “manual” guitar but got destroyed by the machine (as most players do).
Anyway, we can be negative about the show attendance, and I suppose many of the vendors might be. But there was value in the show, and I hope that some of the critics will also consider that aspect of the event as well.
Bottom line: I still think these shows are valuable to the machine vision industry and to the end-user community. I wonder if a show like the Phoenix vision show last week could have been put on at a much lower cost as a “regional” event without losing exhibitors to any great extent by reducing the expense for a vendor to participate. I know this is a complex issue for the show promoters, and in any case I hope that these types of events continue to educate and inform us in the future.
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