Floating cities, autonomous delivery vehicles and a car with legs!

The Future of Everything Festival. Count me in! The opportunity to hear about new technologies and where they’re going and to mix with other people who are interested in this. The Festival is put together by the uber-connected WSJ, and it’s held in Tribeca, New York. Sounded like a great way to spend a few days.

The big surprise was that “everything” includes more than technologies. Well, of course it does, just that I wasn’t thinking that way. There was architecture, cities, fashion, politics, food, energy, consumer goods, sustainability — and technology in pretty much all of them!

My favourite: the car with legs from Hyundai. It’s a concept car rather than a real car at this stage. If you slip off the road, it can get you back up. If you need to go up the steps to collect a wheelchair passenger, it can lift itself up to the door:

And I loved the Nuro autonomous delivery vehicle, which is delivering groceries in Phoenix and Houston:

Even better, turns out that Dave Ferguson — the co-founder who presented — is a kiwi! And he’s coming to MORGO Bay of Islands in August.

Then there was The Lab, with lots of fun stuff to play with. Molecular whiskey anyone? I made my own mix by adding drops of smoky, fruity, oaky flavours. This is Glyph from San Francisco company Endless West. Why spend all that time ageing your whiskey when you can just add the right molecules?

And Segway’s new Drift e-skates, which let each leg go in a different direction — just like starting to ice skate!

And the Magic Leap VR experience and a clever make up dispenser that optically reads your skin before applying just the right minute amount of make up to cover blemishes, and future foods and …

And perhaps after all that, the highlight was the field trip to Brooklyn Navy Yards where we visited New Lab and the Steiner Studios and saw the site on the top of the hill where the old Naval Hospital building lies abandoned.

New Lab is an incubator for mostly hardware projects — growing leather from fungi, a radical new electric motorbike, and a portal that we could enter and talk to people in Gaza City, and lots more. The CEO said that they are very unusual in being mainly a hardware incubator. So I had to tell him about Level Two in Auckland, which has produced Rocketlab and Lanzatech with more exciting companies on the way. Imche from Level Two is going to visit them next week!

Then on to Steiner Studios 50 acres of studios, with 10 acres more in development and another 20 acres up the hill in the wonderfully overgrown grounds of the old Naval Hospital. And it is SO close to Manhattan: