Augmented World Expo 2024-The Industry Conference For Spatial Computing

Augmented World Expo USA 2024, the longest-running and largest event focused on augmented reality and virtual reality, kicked off last Tuesday, June 18, 2024. More than 6,000 attendees, 300 exhibitors, and 575 speakers convened to celebrate the 15th anniversary of AWE and share the latest XR and spatial computing innovations.

When AWE began, the focus was on augmented reality. However, as this industry has evolved over the last five years, the show has become the premier event that shares the latest and greatest developments in VR, XR, AR and spatial computing.

AWE used “spatial computing”, which is becoming a popular term in the industry, in many of the sessions.

I attended the show as a speaker and a member of the media.

I moderated a main-stage panel on the Future of XR Headsets and How They’ll Deliver Our Spatial Future. It was a lively discussion between Said Bakadir, senior director of product Management at Qualcomm, Jason McGuigan, head of Commercial Virtual Reality at Lenovo, and Anna Nilsson, Head of Design and Research at Varjo.

While our panelists discussed many ways XR headsets could impact our spatial future, they all agreed on three key points.

1- XR’s most prominent impact will be in the enterprise for at least the next two to three years. I shared with the audience a link to a website I helped create with ISM that has over 300 case studies of enterprises already using VR for training, digital twins, simulations, etc, as well as in medical, auto, and a plethora of business applications today.

2- XR’s future will be more Mixed Reality (MR) than VR. The panelists all suggested that headsets include more headset displays with pass-through viewing over the next two to three years and allow for more AR functions in addition to VR.

As for actual AR glasses with MR, they suggested that the technology is not yet here to create a form factor for glasses that can deliver a robust MR experience. The general consensus is that we are at least five years away from being able to create MR glasses that can deliver this kind of functionality in this smaller wearable format.

3—When I asked the panelists about Apple’s Vision Pro and its potential impact, Said of Qualcomm pointed out that Apple already had a big impact on AWE as it shifted its main theme to spatial computing this year. They all agreed that Apple’s entering the market is good for the industry and will help make XR-MR drive the future of XR headsets.

While AWE showcased hundreds of new products and services, three stood out.

The first was HaptX’s new G1 Gloves. I saw this technology in a suite the day before the show started. The gloves deliver a realistic touch for training, robotics, and other digital environments. Their booth always had people waiting to test these gloves because they provided realistic touch simulations. This product, while a very high-end solution for now, gives us a glimpse of the future of delivering realistic touch and feel in a spatial world.

The second one that got a lot of attention was the Spacetop laptop from Sightful.

This laptop has no screen but connects to a set of smart glasses that gives the wearer up to a 100″ monitor. They introduced this at AWE last year, but it was a prototype. This year, Insight launched the commercial version. I talked to them before AWE and got a good update. This laptop is an exciting product to watch. It is not a Windows laptop and has its own operating system, named Space OS.

However, it can run any web application, including web versions of MS Word, Excel, Outlook, etc. Their booth also had long lines to test it out, and there was a lot of interest in an AR-based laptop.

The third one was Meta’s new focus on business. In the past, Meta had large booths at AWE pushing its Quest headsets. But this year, Meta’s booth had a laser focus on using the Quest for Work. All of the demo stations showed off business-focused apps. With the Quest 3 and the Quest Pro, which include AR functionality via a pass-through feature, Meta is pushing these headsets as business-ready MR.

Indeed, one company at the show, Campfire, showed a demo that fully utilizes the pass-through function of the Quest 3 and Quest Pro.

Campfire revolutionizes virtual collaboration for the physical economy. Instead of traveling and shipping equipment for meetings, distributed teams can collaborate using digital 3D models of physical products, equipment and environments as if sitting around them.

Campfire’s CEO, Jay Wright, told me that this pass-through feature of Meta Quest’s newest models was a game changer for them. In the past, they had to use special headsets they designed themselves. Now, the software can use an off-the-shelf headset to deliver its software, which can potentially be one of the more important XR software solutions for business.

These are a few of the products that stood out for me, but my Forbes colleague, Charlie Fink, wrote a great overview of AWE that gives more details of the show’s highlights in AR and MR.

AWE has two more shows in 2024:

AWE Asia 2024 -August 26-28 in Singapore.

AWE EU 2024 – Oct 29-30 in Vienna, Austria.

Disclosure: Qualcomm, Lenovo, Microsoft and Apple subscribe to Creative Strategies research reports along with many other high tech companies around the world.