25 years of LabVIEW

The second day of NIWeek started with the second keynote presentation. Jeff Kodosky, the father of LabVIEW, opened the session during which he looked back on 25 years of LabVIEW.

Jeff K was followed by the part that I like most of the NI events: the user applications. Often a few interesting and sometimes quite spectacular real-life applications of NI equipment are presented and demonstrated. This year were on display a portable real-time optical coherence tomography (OCT) device, a structure health monitoring system that is being used for real-time bridge surveillance, the smart grid in Rajasthan, India (did you know that 400 million people in India do not have access to electricity?), a system to control the plasma position in a tokamak (we are talking nuclear fusion here), a couple of robots, an XBox Kinect interface for LabVIEW and a water display that uses water drops as pixels (see photo, can you see "NI" written in droplets?).

The company who made this told me that they have no practical use for such a display.

The keynotes closed with some philosophing about how LabVIEW may evolve during the next 25 years. According to Xilinx, their new Zync platform will play a role here in the near future.

That's all for now folks, I am going to attend a presentation about Arduino, Android & LabVIEW.

P.S. Thanks Greg, I received your text.