Digital Content Expo opened at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Odaiba, Tokyo, today. I went to cover it, and I gotta say – I wasn’t too impressed with the exhibits: Panasonic had their 3D video camera; Fujifilm had their 3D still camera; and a guy at a booth with a little USB-connected plastic-thing-with-a-face that reads out tweets was on the phone with his company, having trouble getting them to read out tweets. (To be fair, they were cute plastic-things-with-a-face.)

There were some teams from universities with small booths tucked cozily into the corners of the dimly-lit main floor, including a Surface-like tabletop display from Nihon University that identifies each of up to four users by using capacitive stools: the finger completes a circuit that conducts through the user’s behind into the stool, then by a snaking cable that disappears into the base of the table. I was unintentionally very good at finding all or most of their lingering bugs, but the technology seems to hold promise.

Toshiba had several iterations of their “Glass-Less 3D screens” on exhibit, with maybe seven people in line at any given time for a look at their upcoming technology. This booth, it should be noted, had a two-hour line at CEATEC Japan, earlier this month. Normal folk weren’t allowed to photograph or film the products at all, and as a press person, I was told I could “only take footage of the images displayed on the screens” – not the TVs themselves, unless there was something else of interest in the poorly-lit booth that they didn’t want me filming.

All in all, DCExpo is an interesting side-trip if you’re in the area or if you were planning on visiting the museum anyway.