Tonight I had the great opportunity to get a sneak peak at the Wired Nextfest show coming to Chicago this weekend.  What a tremendous display of cool gadgets and technologies to come!  Some of these things I had seen or read about before, but they were very cool to see in person.  The following were some of my personal favorites:

CKBOT—A modular robot that can reassemble itself after being broken apart.  Slightly creepy

I Point Presenter—Touch free physical gesture system to control a computer.  Very fun

GigaPan—Digital camera snap on that takes thousands of pictures from different angles and then weaves them into a high res photo with more than a billion pixels.  Huge pictures with uncanny zoom capabilities.

Mower—cartoony Styrofoam sheep robot that roams lawns with shears in the mouth and rangefinder eyes to avoid objects

This is only a start.  Check the rest out for yourself.