The 15th Augmented World Expo (AWE) took place this week in Long Beach. Mixed Reality (MR) on the Oculus Quest and Apple Vision Pro, and a wave of mobile AR tools dominated the show, with AI having a noticeably low profile. So much for my prediction that it would dominate the show.
Collage of people on the Expo floor.
AWE was exceptionally well programmed this year, with 500 speakers on ten tracks in three days. The show included a fireside chat with Oculus inventor Palmer Lucky, a beautiful XR museum, the first 101 members of the AWE Hall of Fame and the annual Auggie Awards show. The show floor featured 300 exhibitors, with a strong showing from developers of Mixed Reality entertainment content.
AWE traditionally begins with a “State of the XR Union” keynote from co-founder and executive director Ori Inbar, which usually involves some technical sleight of hand. This year, he walked on stage wearing a Vision Pro and repeatedly used facial filters to add humor and flair to his lively twenty-minute keynote.
Ori Inbar, co-founder and CEO of AWE, celebrates his 15th annual keynote on stage at AWE 2024.
Inbar emphasized the growth of the industry. A slide that estimated the growing XR market at $35 billion this year, according to ARtillery Intelligence, drew cheers from the audience and exhortations of “the time is now!” from Inbar.
Big numbers provoked big applause. This is an audience of entrepreneurs, opportunists and optimists.
Inbar ended his talk with an endearing bit of self-effacing humor and presented a slide of his predictions for the XR industry in 2014, the most bizarre of which was global adoption of more than a billion headsets by 2023.
Xreal released its Beam Pro at AWE 2024, made exclusively for their Air 2.
Tuesday morning also featured major sponsors and announcements from Niantic, Qualcomm, Snap and Zappar, covering mobile AR and spatial computing production tools.
Niantic introduces its new Niantic Studio, a new visual interface for Niantic 8th Wall developers that offers an entirely new way to build immersive 3D and XR experiences. Traditionally, building web-based XR and 3D experiences has been a code-intensive process with little visual feedback. But with Niantic Studio, now in public beta, developers have a visual interface that makes everything accessible and visible in real time. No app download is required. Niantic Sturio runs in the browser. Users can use spatial anchors to place their creations in specific geographic locations in the physical world.
CTO Bobby Murphy introduced Niantic Studio.
Niantic has also released an updated version of Scaniverse. 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. This is a category killer. No one in full 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 enterprise and education, highlighting that VR’s killer app is training and simulation, using nursing as an example of its application in higher education.
Demonstration of Meta’s Ray Ban audio smartglasses in the exhibition hall.
Echoing Inbar, Anand Dass, director of Mixed Reality Apps at Meta, was effusive as he shared statistics to illustrate Meta’s progress: $2 billion spent on the Quest Store, 500 titles on Quest, a fifth for MR, and more than $10 million earned by 20 developers.
“Today we are excited to announce the Meta Quest lifestyle app accelerator for the first time at AWE,” 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 interested in building fun, tenacious, engaging consumer experiences that leverage the superpowers of the meta Quest platform in emerging lifestyle categories like food and art and music and craft and dating and fashion and beauty and things we haven’t even thought about yet.” The accelerator provides seed funding for prototyping, access to technical product and design resources, and dedicated mentorship.
Snap CTO Bobby Murphy once again delivered his keynote, joining the fireside chat with ARtillery director Mike Boland and Paige Piskin, an AR artist whose clients include Netflix, Warner and L’Oréal. Murphy’s talk focused mainly on the evolving generative AI tools in Snap Lens Studio, their proprietary game engine. He first discussed the many advances in mobile AR, the tools Snap has already created, and the billions of user-generated experiences that have resulted. “Our goal is to empower people to express themselves visually and creatively through new tools and new technology,” said Murphy. Creators can now call up 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.
Connell Gauld, the CTO of Zappar, demonstrated a major upgrade to their Zap.works AR game engine, now called Mattercraft, a browser-based development environment for 3D content. It is a no-code WebXR development tool that represents a significant upgrade in animation, transparent video, world tracking and device capabilities. It also works with headphones.
Chi Xu, founder and CEO of XReal, the most popular and successful AR glasses manufacturer, says his company now controls 45% of the AR glasses market. They’ve had the most success with the Air 2, a screen reflector that attaches to your smartphone and projects the screen as a 200-inch display when viewed from several feet away. XReal introduced the Beam Pro, a $200 dedicated Android device made specifically for its headset. It features dual 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 on the trading floor hoping for a selfie. Lucky did well to chat with each of the dozens of people who approached him.
How to use Meta Quest 3’s Mixed Reality feature.
This was Lucky’s first AWE performance since 2018 and it fit nicely into the historical theme of this 15th annual show. As a speaker, Lucky is even more of a rock star. The man is a soundbite machine.
‘If you’re a whiz kid, everyone wants to talk to you. If you’re a whizman, no one cares. – Palmer Lucky
Lucky had promised on
“My strong 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 greatly from this in my early career. One of the reasons John Carmak wanted to talk to me is because I was a nineteen-year-old kid. If you’re a whiz kid, everyone wants to talk to you. If you’re a whizman, no one cares.
Darshan Shankar, founder and CEO of BigScreen VR, with Oculus founder and VR director Palmer Lucky … [+]
Lucky delivered on his promised reveal, but it was anticlimactic. He had nothing new to show. He brought along a prop, an antique Oculus DK-1 VR headset, and said his new headset was an extension of Anduril’s defenses. His comments about the decade-old DK-1 prototype allowed him, like Inbar, to highlight the success of VR over the past decade. Too high expectations are the problem, Lucky said. “People don’t understand how far it has come.”
Returning to the history theme, legendary University of Washington professor Tom Furness gave a lecture on his long history with VR, dating all the way back to 1966, when he was a young Air Force lieutenant wondering about the critical human factors in design of fighter jets. Furness has spent his career designing what he calls “the jet fighter of the mind.”
The ill-fated Nintendo Virtual Boy was launched in 1995. It was the largest game manufacturer of the esteemed gaming company. … [+]
Unfortunately, I no longer have the time or space to delve deeper into this remarkable 15th annual XR show. As a teaser, here’s a shot of the 1999 Nintendo Virtual Boy on display at AWE’s XR History Museum. There is so much to see and discuss that it is impossible to fit it into one story. I will share more about my experiences on the show floor, the Auggie Award winners and the Best in Show Awards soon.
The 200th podcast “This Week in XR”, recorded live on the AWE exhibition stage on June 20, 2014.
Finally, listen to the 200th “This Week in XR” podcast, recorded live on AWE’s expo stage on Thursday, June 20. The pod includes 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 putting together a conference, and her remarkable personal journey.
More about AWE 2024
AWE 2024: all AR, VR and haptic experiences at Augmented World Expo (David Lumb/CNet)
AWE kicks off in Long Beach (Dean Takahashi/Venturebeat)
I used Meta Ray-Ban glasses and Apple Vision Pro 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: Hands-on Freeaim hiking boots, some photos of new WEART gloves… and a selfie with a giant chicken! (Tony Vitillo/Skarred Ghost)
AWE: practical haptic gloves HaptX, a test of Varjo Teleport and the announcement of Palmer Luckey! (Tony Vitillo/Skarred Ghost)