It’s fun to see the stars and get a glimpse of upcoming films and television series, but one of the highlights of San Diego Comic-Con every year is the chance to get a look at new technology.  Some of the highlights this year:

The Amazon Cube  Amazon Fire had a spectacular exhibit taking up an entire building a couple of blocks from the Convention Center. The star of the show was the new Cube, a combination of their FireTV and Echo. The small cube controls your television. No more remote controls, trying to figure out which one works the DVD player and which one works the cable.  You just speak to it, and it guides you seamlessly though all of the options — channels, streaming services, games, music.

EVO  I was utterly captivated by the tiny spherical robot from Ozobot. Beginning coders of all ages can program it to do all kinds of amazing tricks like following your finger all around a table. If you do not want to program it with the modular commands, you can take colored markers and draw on a piece of paper to make it follow the path you lay out, spin, and change direction. It has superhero skins, so you can have the Hulk interact with Ironman.

Cellarius Imagine someday that the most eagerly anticipated media property at Comic-Con was created not by media professionals but by the fans. That’s the idea behind Cellarius, a kind of Wikipedia of fiction.  Anyone can join, suggest or amend characters, and contribute to the plot.  Here’s how they describe it:

THE CELLARIUS UNIVERSE (CX) IS AN ORIGINAL, TRANSMEDIA CYBERPUNK FRANCHISE THAT LEVERAGES BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY AND USER-GENERATED ASSETS TO CREATE A COLLABORATIVE, FAN-CURATED STORY.