Imagine a world populated with cupcake cars, a giant, remote-controlled game of thumb war and 70 different kinds of 3D printer. Having trouble? You should have gone to the World Maker Faire. The 2012 Faire, which took place September 29 and 30 at the New York Hall of Science, was a nonstop melee of beeping, levitating and self-driving creations, and we've got photos.
As usual, kids made up a large portion of the crowd. These mini-makers gravitated toward the "Nerdy Derby," a build-your-own soapbox car race, and the "Life Size Mousetrap," an enormous Rube Goldberg machine based on the popular board game.
Education was also built in to many of the displays, and visitors could learn how to do everything from building robots to programming in Python. Attendees could also listen to speakers including entrepreneur Seth Godin, roboticist Ken Goldberg and Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson.
Organized by Make Magazine and O'Reilly Media, the Maker Faire has operated in several U.S. cities since its San Mateo, Calif., inauguration in 2006. This time around, the Faire featured around 650 makers and drew about 55,000 people over two days, according to a representative for the museum.
