Augmented World Expo (AWE) held its 15th annual conference and exhibition last week (June 18-20) in Long Beach, California. The conference featured over 500 speakers over three days and over 300 exhibitors on the expo floor. In an article written shortly after the show, I covered the keynotes, panels, and major announcements that focused on mobile AR and Mixed Reality. AI took a back seat, contrary to my expectations. In this article, I’ll talk about what I saw on the expo floor, where I found AWE to be where enterprises, entrepreneurs, games, and entertainment meet.
AWE’s Walk of Fame will honor the first 101 pioneers with new inductees.
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The opening of the show also brought a ton of announcements from companies other than Meta, Snap, Qualcomm and Niantic, which you can see here. While the big tech companies have their own developer conferences, meaning their presence on the expo floor is limited (though still always popular). In fact, the Meta Quest app store experience seems to have had the most success with indie developers, including:
ForgeFX Training and Simulation. Real controls, real equipment, virtual reality training.
Charlie Fink
Distance Technologies, founded by the co-founders of enterprise headset maker Varjo, showed off a prototype that aims an LCD panel at a windshield with a reflective coating to project a transparent image similar to Audi and Volvo’s head-up displays. These simple systems use microprojectors on the dashboard to create a synthetic view, using the windshield as a reflective screen. Distance Technology uses an eye-tracking system to display a full 3D map that can be switched to show different views. Urho Konttori, CEO and co-founder of Distance Technologies, said the target markets are automotive and aerospace.
Johnny Monsarrat demoed his amazing Outdoor Role-Playing Video Game (Outdoor RPG) for mobile AR, available now for free in the app store. Unlike a treasure hunt game where you walk to a GPS point and stop, Monsarrat places the game landscape in a real-world outdoor space and then you walk through it to explore. “This way, any park can become a theme park,” Monsarrat says. When your phone’s camera mixes with physical reality, hundreds of imaginary trees, rocks, creatures, buildings, and other game content populate the role-playing game world.
Spacetop does not have a monitor and uses Xreal’s screen-enhancing smart glasses. Note the additional… [+] Sensors and eye tracking.
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The first thing I saw at the entrance to the exhibit hall was the Spacetop, Meta, Tap, Qualcomm. The Spacetop is a laptop without a monitor, instead it uses Nreal’s new XR glasses to provide what looks like a large screen monitor.
Tap is a wristband that replaces keyboards, mice and handheld controllers. Users tap on a table or in the air. TapXR now supports advanced multi-finger gestures, enabling users to navigate, scroll, select, drag, drop and activate content in a more fluid, immersive and intuitive way in both spatial and standard computing environments without sacrificing precision or comfort.
Meta’s little booth was packed with people every time I walked by.
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Meta was in the front row of the Expo floor mingling with a group of developers interested in the new Meta Quest Lifestyle App Accelerator grant, and they swarmed me every time I walked by.
Qualcomm has always been one of AWE’s largest and most popular exhibitors.
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Qualcomm’s booth was packed with the company’s partners and members of the developer relations team for Snapdragon Spaces, which enables developers’ software to run on all devices that use Snapdragon chipsets.
ForgeFX Training and Simulation. Real controls, real equipment, virtual reality training.
Charlie Fink
Most of what you’ll see on the floor is enterprise, not consumer. Companies selling technology to the XR industry, or XR companies providing hardware and software for training and simulation. There are vendors of optics (Digilens), sensors of all kinds (Ultraleap), accessories (FreeaimVR), gaming tools for creating, managing, editing and storing 3D content (ShapesXR, Playbook AI), and collaboration tools like Campfire 3D and Cisco WebEx.
HaptX Gloves G1™ are now shipping. The G1 offers improved ergonomics and fit, multiple glove sizes, and increased scalability… [+] Haptic functionality and multi-user collaboration features have been added.
Hapt X
Trying out the new HaptX G1 on the show floor.
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HaptX announced it has started shipping its new G1 haptic glove, and the company says it has filled tens of millions of dollars in preorders. The G1 offers improved ergonomics and fit, multiple sizes, extended haptics, and multi-user collaboration capabilities.
This year’s Playground featured a record 17 booths, including interactive storylines, innovative XR fundraising campaigns, multiplayer games, an AR unicorn ride, giant arcade cabinets and inflatable astronauts floating throughout the Playground. Check out all of the Playground experiences here.
I’m obsessed with giant inflatable astronauts.
Charlie Fink
The playground featured four sizable installations: Big Rock Creative, Spacebar, Creator Campus, and The Lunar Light, a free-roaming, location-based VR experience.
Athena Demos and a little art car called “The Rock-It” by artist Justin Gunn.
Big Rock Creative
Big Rock Creative had an eye-catching speedometer at their booth. The company was showcasing BurnerSphere, an immersive app that lets users experience Black Rock City in VR with 3D models and 360/180 video from Burning Man. The company launched the alpha version of the application at the start of AWE on June 18.
Spacebar is a VR barcade set in the wilds of cyberspace. The 15-foot-tall arcade cabinet allows players outside to use physical pinball controls, while players inside the machine play head-to-head pinball and dodgeball. The live VR games are just so much fun; we played knock hockey and darts, among many other things.
I was drawn to Back to Space’s Lunar Light, where giant inflatable astronauts take you on a monorail ride with a backpack to a lunar base, with views of the lunar surface. The attraction is also due to open in Santa Monica, California, later this year.
Wearing a VR headset, users raced in themed power wheelchairs through a gate that only they could see.
Brent Bushnell
Brent Bushnell, formerly of Steam Carnival and Two Bit Circus, created Creator Campus, a “downloadable theme” that can be placed anywhere, including parks, parking lots, and baseball fields. It offers a variety of mixed reality games, including shooters and the racing game Rydeables, in which users wearing VR headsets race themed power chairs through gates that only they can see. It was a lot of fun, but I didn’t have time. This seems like a great idea to me.
For Dark Arts’ “Let’s Dance,” they spun partners visible only to them at AWE 2024.
Dark Arts
The three I was told to try were Pillow (Lucas Rizzotto is an amazing artist working in XR), Fanport (Dave Lorenzini told me about it), and Dark Arts’ VR dance app Let’s Dance (Sarah Hill told me about it). I’ve reviewed Pillow before, but they added features like Sky Fishing just for AWE. If Meta is looking for mixed reality lifestyle apps, the playground at AWE this year was chock full of them. Let’s Dance is not to be missed. My virtual dance partner told me I looked great and she loved the costume changes.
Developed by Draw & Code and 302 Interactive, Fanport is social, interactive, and designed to solve something VR arcades and other existing location-based systems can’t: throughput. In the demo, three people donned Magic Leap 2 HMDs and fought invaders that literally came out of the walls, like the original ML 1 game “Dr. Grordbort’s Invaders.” The system is said to be able to handle more than 100 concurrent users, which is groundbreaking. Putting on and cleaning that many headsets at once presents new logistical challenges. The experimental performance, Kagami, ran for a month at New York’s Off-Broadway Shed Theatre last summer.
A neon arch led visitors from the expo floor to the XR Museum, which featured more than 80 vintage XR devices donated by pioneers. Highlights included 1990’s Xybernaut (one of the first wearable computers), Disney’s Aladdin headset, Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, and the original Meta AR headset, made years before Facebook got its name.
Immersive Archive Project Special immersive experiences offered by the USC Mobile & Environmental Media Lab allow you to explore Ivan Sutherland’s first head-mounted display from 1968 and Morton Heilig’s Sensorama from 1961, the first multi-sensory immersive cinema experience before VR.
My first fully occluded VR experience was with Virtuality in 1992. Think of it as a VR version of Pong. At the time… [+] At a rate of $1 per minute, operators can never hope to recoup their $60,000 bill.
Charlie Fink
It is being restored by a team led by Scott Fischer from USC. Additionally, the XR Museum is paying tribute to the first 101 XR pioneers with a photo gallery and a title of their honour, who will be inducted into the XR Hall of Fame in 2024. Their “stars” will adorn the museum’s walls and are also on the carpet at the entrance to the convention centre.
2024 Auggie Award winner.
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The Auggie Awards took place on the evening of Wednesday, June 19th, just prior to the induction ceremony of the first 101 members into the AWE Hall of Fame.
Auggie Awards. People want that ugly stuff.
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Best Art or Film: JFK Memento: An Immersive Chronicle by TARGO
Best Offers: New Messi Sandwich, CamIOn XR
Best Climate Change Solution: SAMARitan by HENSOLDT Sensors
Best collaboration tool: Cisco’s Webex Hologram
Best Consumer App: Pillow MR for Quest
Best Content Creator: Between Realities VR Podcast
Beat Creator & Authoring Tool: STYLY
Best Developer Tool: 8th Wall/Niantic
Best Education and Training Solution – ImmerseLearn by Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO)
Best Enterprise Solution – Campfire
Best Game or Toy – Kluest by Sons of a Bit Entertainment
Best Headworn Device – Meta Quest 3
Best Health and Wellness: American Heart Association Hands-Only CPR
Best Indie Creator: 3lb Games
Best Interaction Product: HTC Vive Ultimate Tracker
Best Startup – Playbook XR. It also won the startup pitch competition judged by investors Marco DeMiroz (The Venture Reality Fund), Adam Draper (Boost VC), and Abigail Albright (WXR Fund).
Best Location-Based Entertainment – Japantown Geospatial by Rock Paper Reality’s Paper Tree Origami
Best Social Impact Award – WEART’s TouchKEY+ Multi-Sensory Station
The Best Use of AI – AI and Augmented Reality at Pfizer
Best Web3 Implementation Award – SEPHORA UNIVERSE by SURREAL Events
AWE co-founder and CEO Ori Inbar took to the stage at AWE 2024 to deliver the 15th annual keynote address.
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AWE Co-Founder and Executive Director Oli Ingber closed the show the same way he opened it, on the main stage, where he announced the Best in Show awards. The winners were:
Audience Favorite – HaptX
Breakthrough genius – Felix Herbst in weapons research
Awesome Award – USC VR Retrospective
Three lucky winners were awarded cool tech prizes from Pico, Looking Glass Factory, and bHaptics.
Next up was the Virtual World Society’s Nextant Awards. Tom Furness took to the stage again to present three more awards. The winners were:
Spirit Award – Crystal Currie
Rising Star Award – Damon Hernandez
Legacy Award – Jackie Morey
