The University Research Park hosted its second annual mobile application development conference on Thursday at the iHotel and Conference Center. The event was a networking and learning opportunity for those who design and those who use mobile applications.

The event focused on mobile development in the technical, entrepreneurial, and design and user experience fields in Champaign-Urbana.

“This mobile wave is getting more popular, so more and more companies want to have a mobile presence in addition to their Web presence,” said Ling Wong, mobile development consultant for Research Park.

More than 40 speakers representing several different companies came together to share their ideas about developing mobile apps. Alan Craig, associate director of Human-Computer Interaction, represented the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and demonstrated uses of an application that dealt with alternative reality.

The application took an image captured by a smartphone, iPad and other electronic devices and brought it to “life,” making the image sensitive to sights, sounds and touch. When holding a phone up to an image printed on a piece of paper, the image became three-dimensional on the phone.

Craig also showed a paper with a human anatomy printed on it. When holding his phone to the image, the anatomy became three-dimensional on the phone, allowing the user to view the picture from different angles. The user also had the ability to add or remove the skin, muscles, skeleton and organs.

“We’re working with the anatomy and physiology group on campus for their introductory class to see about deploying something like this to them,” Craig said.

The conference ended with a TechMix hosted by Research Park. Companies including 004 Technologies USA, IMO, mpressInteractive and NCSA demonstrated the various uses of their applications at the reception.