The 15th Augmented World Expo (AWE) took place in Long Beach this week. Mixed reality (MR) on Oculus Quest and Apple Vision Pro, as well as a surge in mobile AR tools, dominated the show, while AI kept a notably low profile. So much for my prediction that it would dominate the show.
Collage of people on the Expo floor.
AWE had an exceptionally good lineup this year, with 500 speakers on over a dozen titles over three days. The show included a fireside chat with Oculus creator Palmer Lucky, a wonderful XR museum, the first 101 members of the AWE Hall of Fame, and the annual Auggie Awards ceremony. There were 300 exhibitors on the show floor, including many developers of mixed reality entertainment content.
AWE traditionally begins with a “State of the XR Union” keynote from co-founder and CEO Ori Inbar, which usually includes some technical sleight of hand. This year, he took the stage wearing a Vision Pro and repeatedly used face 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 highlighted the growth of the industry. A slide estimating the growing market for XR at $35 billion this year, according to ARtillery Intelligence, drew cheers from the audience and Inbar’s words, “Now it’s time!”
The large number of people present was met with great applause. The audience consists of entrepreneurs, opportunists and optimists.
Inbar ended his talk with an endearing touch of self-deprecating humor by presenting a slide with his predictions for the XR industry in 2014. The most outlandish of these was that there would be over a billion headsets worldwide by 2023.
At AWE 2024, Xreal unveiled its Beam Pro, developed exclusively for Air 2.
Tuesday morning also saw major sponsors and announcements, which came from Niantic, Qualcomm, Snap and Zappar on mobile AR and spatial computing production tools.
Niantic has unveiled its new Niantic Studio, a new visual interface for developers on Niantic 8th Wall that offers a whole new way to create immersive 3D and XR experiences. Traditionally, creating 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 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, and runs locally on the device. This is a real category killer. No one in volumetric capture can compete with something this fast, this free, and this high quality.
Jamie Keane opened Meta’s keynote with examples of successful MR applications in business and education, emphasizing that training and simulation are VR’s killer app. He cited nursing in higher education as an application example.
Demonstration of the Ray Ban Audio Smartglasses by Meta in the exhibition hall.
Anand Dass, Director of Mixed Reality Apps at Meta, echoed Inbar’s sentiments and was effusive as he presented 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 in revenue from 20 developers.
“Today, we’re 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 using mixed reality and AI. We want to support founders who are interested in creating fun, memorable, and 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 of yet.” The accelerator provides seed capital for prototypes, access to technical product and design resources, and dedicated mentors.
Snap CTO Bobby Murphy again delivered the keynote and participated in the fireside chat with ARtillery CEO Mike Boland and Paige Piskin, an AR artist whose clients include Netflix, Warner, and L’Oréal. Murphy’s talk focused primarily on the evolving tools for generative AI in Snap Lens Studio, their proprietary game engine. He first touched on the many advances in mobile AR, the tools Snap has already built, and the billions of user-generated experiences that have resulted. “Our industry is about giving people the ability to express themselves visually and creatively using new tools and new technologies,” Murphy said. Developers can now incite GenAI images in Lens Studio. Previously, users had to go to Epic Games’ Turbosquid or Sketchfab to select assets for AR experiences.
Connell Gauld, co-founder and CTO of Zappar.
Connell Gauld, CTO of Zappar, demonstrated a major upgrade to their Zap.works AR game engine, now called Mattercraft, which is a browser-based development environment for 3D content. It is a no-code WebXR development tool that represents a significant improvement in capabilities in animation, transparent 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 holds 45% of the AR glasses market. They had the most success with the Air 2, a screen reflector that connects to your smartphone and projects its screen as a 200-inch display that is visible from several feet away. XReal introduced the Beam Pro, a special $200 Android device designed specifically for its headset. It has two cameras and allows stereo photography like the Vision Pro.
After eight years of wonder, I finally took a selfie with Palmer Lucky.
Palmer Lucky, founder of Oculus, is the star attraction of every show he attends, especially AWE. People would trail him around the show floor hoping for a selfie. Lucky was a good sport and chatted with each of the dozens of people who approached him.
Using Meta Quest 3’s Mixed Reality feature.
This was Lucky’s first AWE appearance since 2018 and fit well with the historic theme of this 15th annual show. As a speaker, Lucky is even more of a rock star. The man is a soundbite machine.
“When you’re a prodigy, everyone wants to talk to you. When you’re a prodigy, nobody cares.” – Palmer Lucky
Lucky had promised at X that he would announce details of his next headset at AWE, so the room was packed for his fireside chat with Bigscreen founder and CEO Darshan Shankar and VR director Stephanie Riggs.
“I’m a firm believer that age is one of the most valuable assets a young person has. People want to help you when you’re young,” Lucky said. “I benefited greatly from that early in my career. One of the reasons John Carmak was willing to talk to me is because I was a nineteen-year-old boy. When you’re a prodigy, everyone wants to talk to you. When you’re a prodigy, nobody cares.”
Darshan Shankar, Founder and CEO of BigScreen VR, with Oculus founder Palmer Lucky and VR Director … [+]
Lucky delivered on his promised reveal, but it was disappointing. He had nothing new to show. He brought one prop, an antique Oculus DK-1 VR headset, and said his new headset was an extension of Anduril’s defense work. His comments on the decade-old DK-1 prototype allowed him, like Inbar, to highlight the success of VR over the past decade. Inflated expectations are the problem, Lucky said. “People don’t understand how far things have come.”
Returning to the historical theme, legendary University of Washington professor Tom Furness gave a talk about his long experience with virtual reality, dating back to 1966, when as a young Air Force lieutenant he was puzzling over the critical human factors in fighter jet design. Furness has spent his career designing what he calls “the fighter jet of the mind.”
The ill-fated Nintendo Virtual Boy was released in 1995. It was the biggest … [+]
Unfortunately, I don’t have the time or space to delve deeper into this remarkable 15th annual XR show. As a taster, here’s a picture of the 1999 Nintendo Virtual Boy on display in AWE’s XR History Museum. There’s so much to see and talk about that it’s impossible to fit it all into one story. I’ll follow up shortly with more of my experiences on the show floor, the Auggie Award winners, and the Best in Show awards.
The 200th This Week in XR podcast, recorded live on the AWE Expo 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 podcast features co-hosts Professor Charlie Fink and Studio Head Ted Schilowitz, and 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. In the podcast, Haskins, who is in her third year as Program Director, talks about the challenges of organizing a conference and her remarkable personal journey.
More about AWE 2024
AWE 2024: All AR, VR and haptic experiences at the Augmented World Expo (David Lumb/CNet)
AWE starts in Long Beach (Dean Takahashi/Venture Beat)
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: Freeaim hiking boots to try on, some pictures of the new gloves from WEART… and a selfie with a giant chicken! (Tony Vitillo/Ghost with Skarred)
AWE: Practical haptic gloves HaptX, a review of Varjo Teleport and the announcement of Palmer Luckey! (Tony Vitillo/Ghost with Skarred)