Hyper-connected World using ICT
As Korea’s largest ICT exhibition, the World IT Show has provided visitors with an opportunity to experience state-of-the-art technologies, and businesses with a venue for information provision and sharing to discover new frontiers.
This year, a total of 452 participant companies opened 1,498 booths in the World IT Show 2016. Not only large businesses, but also over 50 small and medium-sized enterprises participated in the exhibition, and about 10 overseas companies planning to enter the Korean market took the opportunity to expand their business.
The show consisted of exhibitions related to the five key issues of 2016: IoT, FinTech, O2O service, big data, and smart cars. This year’s exhibitions were extraordinary in that they were organized as experiential formats for hand-on experience of future technologies. Each participant company created a space to realistically present a futuristic ICT-based hyper-connected society.
Experience future ICT
As the dominant players in Korea’s mobile communication service, SK Telecom and KT attracted a number of visitors with their experience-based exhibitions of 5G mobile communication and various platform services. To demonstrate daily life in the imminent 5G era, SK decorated a part of its exhibition hall as a replica of a city area featuring restaurants, supermarkets, movie theaters, and sport facilities. In the meantime, using the theme of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games, KT presented time-slicing technology to show dynamic movements of athletes from different angles and VR (virtual reality) technology to allow visitors to experience ski jumping and other winter sports. These network-based technologies offered visitors opportunities to have realistic experiences. Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics displayed a wide array of their IT products including smartphones and virtual reality products.
It was the VR experience that was most popular with visitors in the various experiential zones created by the companies. The VR experience had largely been limited to the visual side, but visitors were now able to use their entire bodies in the VR settings.
The World IT Show 2016 also served as a business venue in which large Korean companies and SMEs alike publicized their technologies through diverse exhibitions; a number of SMEs even engaged in export counseling and collaboration work with overseas companies.
ETRI’s latest ICT at a glance
Under the program, which twinned each research department with a business, ETRI showcased various outstanding research outcomes, including twelve latest technologies that can immediately be commercialized by companies and eight products commercialized under ETRI’s support. Some examples are a wireless drone charging system using wireless power transmission technology and an augmented reality-based pre-style technology to enable virtual fitting of clothes on 3D avatars having the same body types as users. In addition, the booths for each company twinned with an ETRI research department demonstrated a range of ICT achievements, including IoT smart healthcare devices that can enable users to manage their daily health condition indicators on their smartphones by monitoring bio-data through sensors.
ETRI also provided information on commercialization direction-setting and technology transfer, and introduced various SME support programs operated by ETRI with the aim of strengthening win-win collaboration with SMEs in Korea.
