I attended Anime Expo 2019 this past weekend and saw a few things that may be of interest to our community.
WACOM has been so dominant in the drawing tablet industry, it was interesting to see a different manufacturer, XP-Pen, showing some innovation in hardware design. They have a number of small tablets that start under $30, that can even work with phones, and display tablets starting at under $200 for a 12” to less than $400 for a 22” display tablet.
I played around a bit and they had a good feel with an interesting ergonomic design. If your school or department needs tablets, this might be worth a test.
While there was a panel on VR, there was only one booth demonstrating any content on VR. As you can imagine the line was pretty long as there were only a handful of headsets and people were commenting on the contamination of sharing headsets with such a large crowd.
Disney has licensed their brand to a company called Life Is Tech that has created an online platform called Disney Technologim School Of Magic that teaches coding, even topics such as shading, while simultaneously allowing the learned to play the game they are creating as they are creating it. This has been launched successfuly in Japan and will soon be available in the US. The idea seems similar to how Apple is producing learning content for their language with the exception that this offering is platform agnostic for both platform and content and… costs $1900. This fee is lifetime but they couldn’t tell me if more topics will be added in the future.
The LA Convention center was packed for 4 straight days demonstrating the love of this art form (and related) is truly vast.
