Let's not beat around the bush. Laser tanks built with Lego Mindstorms, controlled by Palm III's, networked together by Jini, battling it out in an arena. This is a photo of the White tank firing its laser. This is such a great demo. Can Robot Wars be far behind?

OK now that the geeks out there are all excitedly rocking forward and backward in their chairs, let's take a step back.

This is an arena full of tanks.

Here is a 3D console app being demonstrated by its author...
Dennis DeRyke.

Dennis and the team have amazingly cool t-shirt logos. Duke (the Java mascot) holds a Palm device in one hand and has his other arm around his pal the Lego man. I want one of these t-shirts!!!
Here is a driver's eye view simulated on the by the 3D app.

Here is an overhead view of the arena in the 3D app. The tanks moved around according to the commands input by the...
controller application (I think it was a Java app on the KJavaVM) running on the Palm III devices attached via...
this cable.
The cables from the Palm III's led to...
A Sun workstation tying stuff together. The workstation was acting as a Jini wrapper for the Palm III devices since they don't have enough RAM to run Java, RMI, and Jini. The point of this demo was to show that you don't necessarily have to have all the Jini stuff running in a device, just to have that device be part of a Jini network.
Here is a duplicate control UI, showing the Red and Black tanks' controls. Note the message from the Red tank, saying "I just hit an obstruction." The tanks had bumpers with sensors so they could tell if they bumped into one of the walls in the arena.

Here are the Blue and White tanks' control UI's. Note that the Blue tank is saying, "I've been hit."

Here is the side of the Blue tank.
Here's the other side, this time of the Black tank.
Here's the front of the White tank.
Here is one of the IR emitters communicating with the tanks.
Here is Kay Neuenhofen. He's the guy who wrote the Mindstorms code in "NQC" (not quite C) and the "low level Jini stuff". Mike Deleo (wasn't around for me to take his picture) wrote the higher-level Jini stuff.

Kay is probably having fun with his demo but he seems to want everybody to think this is boring work otherwise they might stop paying him or something. That's the only reason I can think of for why he isn't smiling his face off. Maybe his face muscles got tired?
This intern who was also demoing the tank arena to people didn't have any problem smiling...
Nor did these onlookers.

Great job JavaSoft, this is a first class geek grabbing demo!