Mobile AR, MR Surge at AWE 2024

The 15th Extended World Expo (AWE) was held in Long Beach this week. The show was dominated by mixed reality (MR) on the Oculus Quest and Apple Vision Pro and the surge in mobile AR tools, with AI having a remarkably low profile. So much for my prediction that the show would dominate.

AWE was extremely well programmed this year, with 500 speakers over a dozen tracks over three days. The show featured a fireside chat with Oculus inventor Palmer Lucky, the amazing XR Museum, the first 101 members of the AWE Hall of Fame, and the annual Auggie Awards. There were 300 exhibitors on the show floor with a strong showing from Mixed Reality entertainment content developers.

AWE traditionally begins with a “State of the XR Union” keynote address from co-founder and CEO Ori Inbara, which usually includes a technical gimmick. This year he took to the stage in Vision Pro and repeatedly used face filters to add humor and flair to his lively 20-minute keynote.

Inbar highlighted the growth of the industry. The slide, which estimated the growing XR market at $35 billion this year, per ARtillery Intelligence, drew cheers from the audience and exhortations like “now is the time!” from Inbar.

Inbar ended his talk with a cute bit of self-deprecating humor, presenting a slide of his predictions for the XR industry in 2014, the most outlandish of which was global adoption of over a billion headsets by 2023.

Tuesday morning also featured key sponsors and announcements coming from Niantic, Qualcomm, Snap and Zappar about mobile AR and spatial computing production tools.

Niantic has unveiled its new Niantic Studio, a new visual interface for Niantic 8th Wall developers that offers a whole new way to create immersive 3D and XR experiences. Creating web XR and 3D experiences has traditionally 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 need to download any app. Niantic Studio 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 its Scaniverse mobile app. Using a new technique called Guasian Splatting, the scanning app performs volumetric scanning in seconds using smartphone cameras and AI that runs locally on the device. Photogrammetry can’t compete with a category killer like this.

Jamie Keane opened Meta’s keynote with examples of successful MR applications for business and education, highlighting that the killer application of VR is training and simulation, using nursing as an example of how higher education is using the medium.

Echoing Inbar, Anand Dass, Director of Mixed Reality Apps at Meta, was prolific as he shared statistics that illustrate Meta’s progress: $2 billion in Quest Store sales, 500 titles in the Quest Store, one-fifth of which are for MR, and more 20 developers have earned more than $10 million.

“Today we are thrilled to announce AWE, Meta Quest’s lifestyle application accelerator, for the first time,” Dass announced to applause. “This is a brand new six-month program for Quest developers and founders to prototype new life experiences with mixed reality and artificial intelligence. We want to support founders interested in creating fun and engaging consumer experiences that leverage the meta Quest platform’s superpowers in emerging lifestyle categories like food and arts and music and crafts and dating and fashion and beauty and things we didn’t even have . thought.” The accelerator provides early-stage prototyping funding, access to technical product and design resources, and dedicated mentorship.

Snap CTO Bobby Murphy once again delivered the keynote and participated in a fireside chat with ARtillery director Mike Boland and Paige Piskin, an AR artist whose clients include Netflix, Warner and L’Oréal. Murphy’s talk was mainly about the evolving Generative AI tools in Snap Lens Studio, their proprietary game engine. First, he reviewed the many advances in mobile AR, the tools Snap has already made, and the billion user experiences that have resulted. “Our goal is to empower people to express themselves visually and creatively through new tools and new technologies,” Murphy said. Creators can now call up GenAI images inside Lens Studio. Previously, users had to go to Turbosquid or Epic Games’ Sketchfab to select assets for AR experiences.

Connell Gauld, CTO of Zappar, showed off a major upgrade to its Zap.works AR game engine, now called Mattercraft, a browser-based 3D content development environment. It is a code-free WebXR developer tool that represents a significant upgrade in capabilities in animation, transparent video, world tracking, and device functionality. It also works with headphones.

Chi Xu, founder and CEO of XReal, the most popular and successful manufacturer of AR glasses, says his company now has 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 its screen like a 200” display seen from several feet away. XReal has introduced the Beam Pro, a $200 dedicated Android device built specifically for its headset. It is equipped with dual cameras that enable stereography like Vision Pro.

Palmer Lucky, the founder of Oculus, is the main attraction at every show he attends, especially AWE. People lined up behind him on the show floor, hoping for a selfie. Lucky was a good sport about it, chatting with each of the dozens of people who approached him.

This was Lucky AWE’s first performance since 2018 and it fit in beautifully with the historical theme of this 15th anniversary show. As a speaker, Lucky is even more of a rock star. That man is a biting machine.

“When you’re a little kid, everybody wants to talk to you.” When you’re a slob, nobody cares.” – Palmer Lucky

Lucky at X promised to reveal details about his next headset at AWE, so the room was packed for his fireside chat with Darshan Shankar, founder and CEO of Bigscreen, and VR director Stephanie Riggs.

“It is my firm opinion 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 from it so much 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 little kid, everyone wants to talk to you. When you’re a slob, nobody cares.’

Lucky delivered on his promised reveal, but it was anticlimactic. He had nothing new to show. He brought a prop, an antique Oculus DK-1 VR headset, and said his new headset is an extension of Andurila’s defense work. His comments on the ten-year-old DK-1 prototype allowed him to highlight, like Inbar, the success of VR over the past decade. The problem is overblown expectations, Lucky said. “People don’t understand how far things have come.

Back on the subject of history, legendary University of Washington professor Tom Furness talked about his long history with VR dating back to 1966, when he was a young lieutenant in the Air Force and puzzled over critical human factors in design. fighter planes. Furness has spent his career designing what he calls a “mind fighter”.

Unfortunately, I ran out of time and space to delve deeper into this remarkable 15th annual XR show. As a teaser, here’s a shot of the Nintendo Virtual Boy from 1999, part of AWE’s XR History Museum. There is so much to see and talk about that it is impossible to fit it into one story. I will follow up soon with more of my experiences on the show floor, winners of Auggie Awards and Best in Show Awards.

Finally, listen to the 200th “This Week in XR” podcast, recorded live on the AWE show stage on Thursday, June 20. The module features co-hosts Professor Charlie Fink and Studio Leader 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. In the podcast, Haskins, in her third year as program director, shares the challenges of organizing the 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 and Apple Vision Pro glasses to cover the extended 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 boots, some pictures of WEART’s new gloves… and a selfie with a giant chicken! (Tony Vitillo/Scarred Ghost)

AWE: HaptX Hands-On Haptic Gloves, Varjo Teleport Test and Palmer Luckey Announcement! (Tony Vitillo/Scarred Ghost)