It is described as the greatest show (and tell) on Earth, a family-friendly festival of invention, creativity and resourcefulness. Think Glastonbury meets TEDx and you get an idea. And now it's coming here. An unashamed celebration of geekdom, Maker Faire is, according to its founders, "an all-ages gathering of tech enthusiasts, crafters, educators, tinkerers, hobbyists, engineers, science clubs, authors, artists, students, and commercial exhibitors".

To the uninitiated, that may sound like a glorified Star Trek convention, but Maker Faires have enjoyed huge success in the US, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors and helping popularise a raft of product innovations including 3D printers and build-it-yourself computers, drones and robots.

Today, at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, Maker Faire will announce that it is to open its third annual flagship fair, the first outside the US, at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London. The event, which from next year will run in the summer holidays for up to four weeks, is expected to draw up to 75,000 people.

For the London Legacy Development Corporation it is a major coup that will help the 2012 London Games meet one of its key aims – regenerating a once unloved part of the capital.

"This is yet another example of how the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park is attracting the cream of world-class international events," said the mayor of London, Boris Johnson. "In turn, this is propelling forward our vision to cultivate a hotbed of tech talent on the site, creating thousands of jobs."

But the arrival of Maker Faire also symbolises a fundamental shift taking place in the technology arena. Hi-tech titans are waking up to the possibilities of making everyday objects communicate and process information. Harnessing these capabilities, developing what is being called the "Internet of Things", will pay huge dividends, according to the likes of Cisco and Intel. Google, for example, recently paid $3.2bn for Nest, a home-appliance business that makes things like thermostats and carbon monoxide alarms which collect user behaviour data, allowing them to offer more personalised functionality.

Consultant McKinsey explains: "Sensors and actuators embedded in physical objects – from roadways to pacemakers – are linked through wired and wireless networks, often using the same internet protocol (IP) that connects the internet. These networks churn out huge volumes of data that flow to computers for analysis. When objects can both sense the environment and communicate, they become tools for understanding complexity and responding to it swiftly."

Put simply, the physical world is becoming a gigantic information system. Everything from your watch to what you wear will be connected one day. Consultancy firm Gartner estimates that, by 2020, there will be nearly 26bn devices connected to the Internet of Things.

It may sound far-fetched, but this brave new world is already out there. McKinsey points out that pill-shaped microcameras can travel through the human body, sending back thousands of images to help doctors pinpoint the sources of illness; farming equipment with wireless links to data collected from remote satellites and ground sensors is now capable of recognising changes to crop conditions; billboards in Japan are examining passersby, assessing how they fit consumer profiles and adjusting their messages accordingly.

Simultaneously, the obstacles that must be negotiated between coming up with an idea for a new device and delivering it to market are shrinking, and the demarcation lines between the professional device manufacturer and the amateur are blurring. Crowdfunding is connecting money to popular ideas. The maker movement is at the vanguard of this trend, as developments such as 3D printing and the use of open-source software create an explosion in the number of products being developed by everyone from enthusiastic individuals to start-ups, spinoffs and cottage industries.

Anticipating this trend, Maker Faire claims it provides the cultural space for this new generation of makers to dazzle the world with inventions, many of which will help shape the Internet of Things.

"Many makers say they have no other place to share what they do," it explains on its website. "DIY is often invisible in our communities, taking place in shops, garages and on kitchen tables. It's typically out of the spotlight of traditional art or science or craft events. Maker Faire makes visible these projects and ideas."

Maker Faires certainly appear to tap into latent demand. The two annual flagship events, in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York, plus nearly 100 mini-Faires around the globe (the next UK one is in Newcastle from 26-27 April), draw large crowds. In 2013 more than 530,000 people across 10 countries attended a Maker Faire, a 64% increase on the previous year and 335% up on 2011. Around half attended the events with children.

A danger must be that the burgeoning maker movement becomes a victim of its own success – that what started as a grassroots initiative ends as little more than another technology showcase to attract corporate interests as they seek to cherrypick the new devices that will help power an increasingly connected world.

But Dale Dougherty, the founder of Maker Faire, pledged that the event would not lose sight of its guiding ethos. "It should be creative and fun and engaging," Dougherty said. "Business opportunities may emerge, but that's not the goal. For me, it's about education and learning; really encouraging the next generation of builders and producers."

Here East, the consortium that runs the 650,000 sq ft Olympic Park media centre that will host the UK event, believes there will be appetite for the US import. It points out that the maker movement in east London has grown rapidly in recent years with companies such as Sugru, which produces "self-setting rubber for fixing, modifying and improving your stuff", and Technology Will Save Us, which makes kits allowing gadget freaks to build everything from synthesisers to speakers, attracting global attention.

"This is an exciting opportunity for east London," said Gavin Poole, CEO of Here East. "Something on this scale, bringing product design and technology together, has never been done before."

He said the intention was for the Here East site to become a tech-based campus that would be very different in feel from Shoreditch's Silicon Roundabout.

"The aim is to attract small companies who are into product design before they go to scale," he said, emphasising that Here East wanted to create an inclusive, interactive community, bringing in local schools and talent, including the hundreds of artists who work in Hackney Wick, across the river Lee from the park.

Sceptics are likely to be wary of such ambitions. The Internet of Things is being promoted by vested interests with an enthusiasm not seen since the last dotcom boom. Cisco claims the Internet of Things will have a value of £8.6tn by 2023. Here East claims its vision of a super-connected world, largely built from the bottom up, will create more than 7,500 jobs in east London and add £450m to the UK's GDP.

If these predictions come true, then the inventors beavering away in their sheds, creating ingenious devices, are no longer "mavericks". They are the future. The geeks will truly inherit the Earth.