After a great vision show in Boston, my summer travel schedule was light and as fall approaches, I look forward to traveling again. Whether it is a week at McCormick place in Chicago or returning to Detroit, it should be an interesting season.

If you’ll be at Chicago’s IMTS, September 8 to 13, I hope we can get a chance to meet up. Feel free to stop by-it’s a local show for me, so I’ll be there all week visiting booths and shooting video. Stay tuned for post-show coverage on Q-Tube, our Quality TV offering.

From September 30 to October 2, the International Conference for Vision Guided Robotics in Novi, MI, will offer plenty of useful information, including tutorials on robotics, machine vision and integrating vision guided robotics.

The final vision show of the year will occur the following month, as Vision 2008 returns to Stuttgart, Germany, November 4 to 6. I hear that shows abroad are exciting, so if you go, let me know how it went. (Also, feel free to send me your candy and souvenirs from the show. I prefer chocolates.)

The show will include 25% more hall space than last year, and exhibitors will offer components for cameras, LEDs, optics, frame grabbers, processors and software. In addition to the exhibits, the show will have industry insiders present their latest findings, and the Vision Award will be presented for the 16th time for innovations in the machine vision industry.

There is obviously no shortage of innovation in machine vision-think of how much it has changed in the past 10 years-so the results should be worth seeing.

And on the horizon, the AIA Vision Show leaves Boston next year. For the first time, the show will be held in Phoenix at the Phoenix Convention Center, March 31 to April 2.

And for those of you who think both long term and long distance, Machine Vision China will be March 24 to 26, 2009, in Shanghai.

If you missed your chance to go to China for the Olympics last month, here’s your chance to visit the country during a slightly less busy season. However, your chance of seeing a superstar athlete may also be smaller. This also means you won’t be distracted by constant Olympic television coverage, with less opportunity to watch synchronized diving or equestrian jumping.

While the real world is plenty interesting, there are a lot of happenings in the virtual world as well.

Vision & Sensors covers a changing industry. The pace of change and growth is impressive. Just as the topics we cover are expanding and growing, so too is the magazine and its Web site. Vision & Sensors aims to have six issues in 2009, and a Web site with updated, informative content.

To that end, we’ve added industry news headlines to the sites and web exclusives are in the works. Although it seems as if our Vision & Sensors Web site was just launched, it is now on its way to a redesign. Keep an eye out for changes and let me know your thoughts.

This issue features articles on frame grabbers, lighting, lenses and machine vision integration, along with news, products and an optical character recognition case study. I hope you enjoy reading it, and please let us know what you think of this issue.

And in general, if you have any ideas you’d like to share for Vision & Sensors, or would like to contribute, please e-mail me at [email protected]. It might be easier than hunting me down at a trade show, and I won’t be distracted by tables of free candy.

Michelle Bangert
Managing Editor