Chris Anderson’s favorite gadget at the Javits Center is the walking Albert Einstein robot, equipped with cameras in its eyes, which enable it to recognize and interact with humans.

That robot is one of the 160 scientific exhibits on display at NextFest, a three-day technology show for the public, opening today and expected to attract 46,000 visitors. The show, staged by Wired magazine, where Mr. Anderson is editor in chief, is modeled on the World Fairs of decades past, meant to show people the technology that might shape their everyday lives in the near future .

“The stuff here is right out of the lab, not yet on the market. It’s stuff no one’s seen before,” he said, walking by one exhibitor who showed off a new radio frequency identification-enabled, secure boarding pass that matches it to just one traveler and — theoretically, at least — makes going through security faster.

One of the first displays in the hall is called Fogscreen, created by a Finnish company of the same name. Images are projected onto a screen made of ultrafine vapor that looks like the mist of a waterfall but is dry to the touch. New York University’s Courant Institute designed the Media Mirror, a large-scale interactive video installation that transforms video images into a realtime mosiac of 200 television screens.

The Laptop Orchestra, by the Italian company Limiteazero, consists of 15 laptops, each producing its own sounds and images. NextFest patrons can conduct the contraption by standing on a podium and waving a special baton. A San Francisco-based company, Pay by Touch, has developed a debit card machine that uses fingerprints instead of pin codes. Denmark’s Vestergaard Frandsen has developed a water purification tool, Life Straw, that it claims kills 99.9% of the disease-causing organisms in drinking water.

Wired’s reporters and editors handpicked the exhibitors for their innovations in areas like design, environmentally friendly living, and social games. One game called “Brainball,” by Sweden’s Interactive Institute, had people lining up to play at the opening reception on Wednesday. Players wear brainwave detecting headbands that move a ball across a table, in accord with a player’s stress level. The winner is the player who controls his stress the most.

Mr. Anderson is also using NextFest to plug his new book, “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.” He tracks how the Internet is moving the American economy and culture away from blockbuster products toward a world where there’s a large market for every niche product and where everyone’s creativity can find an outlet.

Wal-Mart, for example, carries about 4,500 music albums, while Amazon offers more than 800,000, and how books that rank 100,000th or lower on its bestseller list nevertheless make up a quarter of its sales. Therein lies the “Long Tail” of the sales curve.

At the individual level, he said, the Internet has made “our culture fragment into a million tiny subcultures.”

The emancipation of niche products is not the only benefit of technology, according to his book. Technologies like desktop music and editing software and blogging tools transformed people from being passive consumers into active producers. “It’s the end of the couch potato era,” Mr. Anderson said.

It has ushered in a collaborative era, embodied by Wikipedia, which he calls “open source in its purest form.” His own book, which began as an article in Wired in October 2004 in which he coined the term “Long Tail,” is the product of collaboration with his readers, with 5,000 of them serving as a sounding board as he developed his ideas on his blog.

A former researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the 41-year-old Mr. Anderson said mass culture will not be felled by the Internet. He acknowledges common culture can be a social glue, but will simply be less “mass,” while niche cultures will become less obscure, and the online world will continue to coexist more easily with socalled bricks-and-mortar traditionalists. “Crowd-sourcing” (getting your customers to do your work, like online reviews, for you) is entering the mainstream vernacular.

Mr. Anderson says globalization and increased broadband have bolstered the Long Tail. He said he considers the largest remaining impediment to unleashing the Long Tail economy to be the difficulty of securing the rights to music and publications, which explains why some songs are available on iTunes in America but not in Britain, despite the Internet’s supposed absence of borders.

“Digital rights are the large elephant in the room,” he said, “but we’ll get there.”

Mr. Anderson said the lessons of the Long Tail can apply to industries that can’t avoid physical inventories. Anheuser-Busch’s “Long Tail Libations” is getting microbrews — niche beers — into stores alongside Budweiser.