CRI听力: High-tech Highlights the 2010 Taipei Floral Exposition

Paper-thin speakers shaped as leaves and hologram flowers are just some of the installations at the Taipei Floral Exposition.

Our reporter Li Dong has the details.


Besides flowers, the annual Taipei Floral Exposition also serves as a platform where Taiwanese artists and engineers use technology-generated flowers and plants to show their skills. The Pavilion of Dreams is the venue for all the high-tech stuff in the exposition.

Designed by the Industrial Technology Research Laboratories of Taiwan, the paper-thin speakers called FleXpeakers were given a "best design product" award last year by "The Wall Street Journal."

The speakers are made from a thin, flexible metal coated with a vibrating membrane with strategically placed sensors. The 0.1-watt FleXpeakers can generate sound as powerful as a regular one-watt speaker.

Chang Ho Liou is Project Manager for Industrial Technology Research Laboratories.

"Among the technologies on display here, one of them is the paper-thin speaker which is designed so the product can be produced like paper and therefore offer a different application compared to the traditional speakers that we have."

In an adjacent exhibition room, a row of 65-inch flat screens run animated 3-D films of flowers and plants, which visitors can view without special glasses, because the screens have been engineered to display something known as lenticular imaging.

Each eye sees a different view of the object, which allows the brain to process a single 3-D image.

Apart from the vertical 3-D screen, the pavilion also features hologram makers, creating 3-D holograms of flowers.

In another room, visitors can shake a stamen in a giant flower to release laser light pollen. The vibrations created when visitors hit the stamen are used to generate the light.

A light-sensitive globe can also sense the shadows created by visitors' hands and respond with an audio and video display.

Just around the corner, a wall of three-meter-tall liquid crystal glass panels that look like a giant transparent bowl show a life-like projection of flowers in the wild.

Unlike conventional flat designs, the 18 panels are curved to create a stunning visual effect. Engineers changed the properties of the membranes attached to the glass so light can permeate the curved surface evenly, just like it does on a flat screen.

The exposition has so far drawn a million visitors since it opened in November. Brian Huang is one of them.

"For the paper-thin speakers, I think the design is very unique. So with the technology and the innovation used in the design, it definitely puts Taiwan in a competitive position when compared to others."

Already recognized as a supplier of smartphones and computer components to some global technology companies, Taiwan wants to use the Dream Pavilion to highlight its capacity for product innovation in the increasingly competitive high-tech world.

The expo runs until April.

For CRI, I am Li Dong.