Glasses, Gadgets, Touch and Play at AWE 2024

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 the exhibit hall featured over 300 exhibitors. My post on Saturday focused on the keynotes, panels, and major announcements at the show, which was focused on mobile AR and Mixed Reality. AI took a back seat, contrary to my expectations. In this post, I’ll talk about what I saw on the exhibit hall, where I found AWE, where businesses and entrepreneurs meet.

With the show kicking off came a ton of announcements from companies other than Meta, Snap, Qualcomm and Niantic, which you can see here. The best demos often don’t happen on the show floor, but in private conferences or hotel suites. Big tech companies have their own developer conferences, so their presence on the floor is limited. Microsoft was here to talk about Mesh, not about Hololens. The AWE love fest is about welcoming the future, not talking about big-money blunders.

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.

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 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’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.

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 (VR shoes), gaming tools for creating, managing, editing and storing 3D content (ShapesXR), and collaboration tools like Campfire 3D and Cisco WebEx.

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.

The playground featured four sizeable installations: Black Rock Creative, Spacebar, Creator Campus, and The Lunar Light, a free-roaming, location-based VR experience.

Black Rock Creative’s booth featured an eye-catching speedometer as the company showcased PlayaPortals, an immersive app that lets users experience Black Rock City in VR, with 3D models and 360/180-degree video from Burning Man.

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.

Attracted by a giant inflatable astronaut, I headed to Luna Aqua, a location-based PCVR experience with free-roaming. You strap on a backpack and travel on a monorail to a lunar base, enjoying the lunar landscape. They plan to bring the attraction to Santa Monica, California, later this year, and hope to succeed where Dreamscape and The Void failed. SandboxVR says they’re printing money, so maybe they can make it happen.

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.

The three I was told to try were Pillow (Lucas Rizzotto), Fanport (Dave Lorenzini), and a VR dance app. Let’s dancefrom Dark Arts. We’ve reviewed Pillow in the past, but it added features like Sky Fishing exclusively for AWE. If Meta is looking for mixed reality lifestyle apps, this year’s AWE playground was brimming with them. Don’t miss Let’s Dance; my virtual dance partner told me I looked great and loved the costume changes.

Created by Draw & Code, 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 over 100 concurrent users, which is groundbreaking. Putting on that many headsets at once and cleaning them 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.

It is being restored by a team led by Scott Fischer at 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.

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.

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 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