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Jed Boal ReportingUtah has a great history of innovation -- artificial organs, fry sauce and TV. Today, inventors and entrepreneurs showed off the cutting edge technologies that might change your world tomorrow.
The future is now at the seventh annual Edison Showcase. This is digital clay modeling, new computer-assisted design. When you work with the Sensable pen, you actually can feel that blob on screen. The tool box lets you change the object, move it around, punch holes through it. Doctors could use it to train for surgery.
The goal of the showcase is to spot innovative technologies coming out of universities and businesses, and to get the inventors and entrepreneurs in the same room.
Terrence Chatwin, Utah Engineering Experiment Station: "Together they can create commercialization. One of them alone cannot accomplish that."
Information technology, medical innovations, new composites from aerospace, better pull tabs, high pressure storage tanks, even the latest skis.
Dave Goode moved his ski company to Ogden a year ago. He was the first to make a carbon-fiber ski pole more than two decades ago, then water skis. Now they're building carbon fiber snow skis.
Dave Goode, Goode Ski Technology: "Being here in Utah with the mountains and the world's greatest snow, it's a good place to develop, test and build our products."
Moxtek of Orem makes components for Sony that make HDTV's sharper and more colorful.
Glenn Stewart, Moxtek: "The polarizers and beam-splitters we make do the very best job of providing high contrast and a more pleasing picture."
The cutting edge is getting sharper, too. There were 350 participants this year and organizers expect twice that number next year when it moves to the Salt Palace.
