The 15th Augmented World’s Fair (AWE) took place this week in Long Beach. Mixed reality (MR) on Oculus Quest and Apple Vision Pro, as well as the rise of mobile augmented reality tools dominated the show, with AI having a remarkably low profile. So much for my prediction that this would dominate the series.
Collage of people on the Expo floor.
AWE was exceptionally well scheduled this year, with 500 speakers on a dozen titles over three days. The show included a fireside chat with Oculus inventor Palmer Lucky, a wonderful XR museum, the first 101 members of the AWE Hall of Fame, and the annual Auggie Awards. On the exhibition site were 300 exhibitors, with a strong presence of mixed reality entertainment content developers.
AWE traditionally kicks off with a “State of the XR Union” speech from co-founder and executive director Ori Inbar, which usually includes some technical sleight of hand. This year, he took the stage with a Vision Pro and repeatedly used facial filters to add humor and style to his lively twenty-minute speech.
Ori Inbar, co-founder and CEO of AWE, celebrates his 15th annual speech on stage at AWE 2024.
Inbar highlighted the growth of the industry. A slide estimating the growing XR market at $35 billion this year, according to ARtillery Intelligence, drew cheers from the audience and exhortations such as “the time is now!” » by Inbar.
Big numbers brought loud applause. This is an audience of entrepreneurs, opportunists and optimists.
Inbar ended his speech with endearing, self-effacing humor, presenting a slide of his predictions for the XR industry in 2014, the most outlandish of which was the global adoption of more than a billion headsets by 2023 .
Xreal released its Beam Pro designed exclusively for its Air 2 at AWE 2024.
On Tuesday morning, the biggest sponsors and announcements also came from Niantic, Qualcomm, Snap and Zappar regarding mobile augmented reality and spatial computing production tools. Niantic, the company behind the hit PokemonGo, has opened its Niantic Studio with WebXR. No app download is necessary. It runs in the browser. Users can use spatial anchors to place their creations in specific geographic locations in the physical world.
Niantic also released an updated version of Scanverse. Using a new technique called Guasian Splatting, the scanning app performs volumetric capture in seconds using the smartphone’s cameras and AI, running locally on the device. It’s a category killer. No one in Vol Cap can compete with something this fast, free and high quality.
Jamie Keane opened Meta’s keynote with examples of successful applications of MR for business and education, highlighting that the flagship application of VR is training and simulation, using nursing as an example of its application in higher education.
Demonstration of Meta’s Ray Ban audio smart glasses in the exhibition hall.
Echoing Inbar, Anand Dass, director of mixed reality applications at Meta, was generous in sharing statistics to illustrate Meta’s progress: $2 billion spent in the Quest Store, 500 titles on Quest, a fifth for MR and over $10 million won by 20 developers.
“Today, we are excited to announce for the first time at AWE, the Meta Quest lifestyle app accelerator,” Dass announced to applause. “This is a brand new six-month program for Quest developers and founders to prototype new lifestyle experiences with mixed reality and AI. We want to support founders who want to create fun, engaging consumer experiences that leverage the superpowers of the Quest meta platform in emerging lifestyle categories like food & art & music & craft & dating and fashion and beauty and things we don’t even have. Reflect on.” The accelerator provides seed funding for prototyping, access to technical product and design resources, and dedicated mentoring.
Snap CTO Bobby Murphy delivered his keynote again and participated in the fireside chat with ARTillery head Mike Boland and Paige Piskin, an AR artist whose clients include Netflix, Warner and L ‘Oreal. Murphy’s talk focused primarily on the evolution of the generative AI tools in Snap Lens Studio, their proprietary game engine. He first reviewed the many advances in mobile AR, the tools Snap has already created, and the billion user-generated experiences that have resulted. “We want to spread AI to the world,” he said. Creators can now view GenAI images in Lens Studio. Previously, users had to go to Epic Games’ Turbosquid or Sketchfab to choose assets for AR experiences.
Connell Gauld, co-founder and CTO of Zappar.
Zappar CTO Connell Gauld introduced a major upgrade to its Zap.works AR game engine, now called Mattercraft, which is a browser-based 3D content development environment. It is a no-code WebXR development tool that represents a significant upgrade in animation, seamless video, world tracking, and device capability. It also works with headsets.
Chi Xu, founder and CEO of XReal, the most popular and successful AR glasses maker, says his company now has 45% of the AR glasses market. They’ve had the most success with the Air 2, which is a screen reflector that attaches to your smartphone and projects its screen as a 200-inch screen viewed from several feet away. XReal introduced the Beam Pro, a $200 dedicated Android device designed specifically for its headset. It sports two cameras, allowing stereography like the Vision Pro.
After eight years of AWE, I finally got a selfie with Palmer Lucky.
Palmer Lucky, founder of Oculus, is the main attraction at every show he attends, especially AWE. People followed him around the showroom hoping for a selfie. Lucky was a good sport, chatting with every one of the dozens of people who approached him.
Using Meta Quest 3’s Mixed Reality feature.
This was Lucky’s first appearance at AWE since 2018, and it fits perfectly with the historic theme of this 15th annual show. As a speaker, Lucky is even more of a rock star. This man is a soundbite machine.
“When you’re a prodigy, everyone wants to talk to you. When you’re a prodigy, no one cares. – Lucky Palmer
Lucky had promised on Riggs.
“My opinion is that one of the most valuable assets you have as a young person is your age. People want to help you when you’re young,” Lucky said. “I benefited so much from it early in my career. One of the reasons John Carmak was willing to talk to me was because I was a child of nineteen. When you’re a prodigy, everyone wants to talk to you. When you’re a prodigy, no one cares.
BigScreen VR Founder and CEO Darshan Shankar with Oculus Founder Palmer Lucky and VR Director … (+)
Lucky kept his promise of disclosure, but it wasn’t to be. He had nothing new to show. He brought a prop, an old Oculus DK-1 VR headset, and said his new headset was an extension of Anduril’s defense work. His comments around the ten-year-old DK-1 prototype allowed him to highlight, like Inbar, the success of virtual reality over the last decade. Inflated expectations are the problem, Lucky said. “People don’t understand how far things have come.”
Returning to the theme of history, legendary Professor Tom Furness of the University of Washington spoke about his long history with virtual reality, dating back to 1966, when he was a young lieutenant in the Army of the air and questioned critical human factors in design. combat aircraft. Furness has spent his career designing what he calls “the fighter plane of the mind.”
The ill-fated Nintendo Virtual Boy was released in 1995. It was the biggest game from the popular video game company. … (+)
Unfortunately, I no longer have the time and space to delve into this remarkable 15th annual XR show. As a teaser, here’s a photo of the 1999 Nintendo Virtual Boy, featured in AWE’s XR History Museum. There is so much to see and talk about that it’s impossible to sum it all up in one story. I will return shortly to more of my experiences on the show floor, Auggie Award winners and Best in Show Awards.
The 200th “This Week in XR” podcast, recorded live on stage at the AWE Expo on June 20, 2014.
Finally, listen to the 200th “This Week in XR” podcast, recorded live on the AWE Expo stage on Thursday, June 20. The podcast features co-hosts Professor Charlie Fink and Studio Director Ted Schilowitz, with special guests AWE Program Director. Sonya Haskins, developer and blogger, Tony Vitillo, Cosmo Scharf, founder of VRLA, and Jenny Lowrey, founder of Eye-Q Productions. On the podcast Haskins, in her third year as program director, shares the challenges of organizing a conference and her remarkable personal journey.
Learn more about AWE 2024
AWE 2024: all the AR, VR and haptic experiences at the Augmented World Expo (David Lumb/CNet)
AWE kicks off in Long Beach (Dean Takahashi/Venture Beat)
I used Meta Ray-Ban and Apple Vision Pro glasses to cover the Augmented World Expo (Ian Hamilton/UploadVR)
4 New Things I Saw at AWE 2024 That Will Make You Want AR and VR in Your Life (Scott Stein/CNet)
AWE: practical Freeaim walking shoes, some photos of the new WEART gloves… and a selfie with a giant chicken! (Tony Vitillo/Skarred Ghost)
AWE: Practical HaptX haptic gloves, a test from Varjo Teleport and the announcement from Palmer Luckey! (Tony Vitillo/Skarred Ghost)