Mobile AR, MR Surge At AWE 2024

The 15th Augmented World Expo (AWE) took place in Long Beach this week. Mixed Reality (MR) on the Oculus Quest and Apple Vision Pro, and a surge in mobile AR tools dominated the show, with AI having a remarkably low profile. So much for my prediction that it would dominate the show.

AWE was exceptionally well programmed this year, with 500 speakers over a dozen tracks in three days. The show featured a fireside chat with Oculus inventor Palmer Lucky, a marvelous XR museum, the first 101 members of the AWE Hall of Fame, and the annual Auggie awards show. On the expo floor were 300 exhibitors, with a strong showing from developers of Mixed Reality entertainment content.

AWE traditionally kicks off with a “State of the XR Union” keynote from co-founder and Executive Director, Ori Inbar, which usually includes a techincal sleight of hand. This year he walked on stage wearing a Vision Pro, and repeatedly used face filters to add humor and flair to his lively twenty minute keynote.

Inbar highlighted the industry’s growth. A slide that estimated the growing market for XR at $35 Billion this year, per ARtillery Intelligence, elicited cheers from the audience and exhortations like “the time is now!” from Inbar.

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

Tuesday morning also featured the most important sponsors and announcements, which came from Niantic, Qualcomm, Snap, and Zappar about mobile AR and spatial computing production tools. Niantic, the company behind the hit PokemonGo, opened up its Niantic Studio with WebXR. No app download needed. It runs in the browser. Users can utilize spatial anchors to place their creations in specific geographic places in the physical world.

Niantic also released an updated version of Scaniverse. Using a new technique called Guasian Splatting the scanning app does volumetric capture in seconds using the smartphone’s cameras and AI, running locally on-device. This is a category killer. No one in vol cap can compete with something this fast, free and high quality.

Jamie Keane opened Meta’s keynote with examples of successful applications of MR for enterprises and education, emphasizing that VR’s killer app is training and simulation, using nursing as an example of its application in higher education.

Echoing Inbar, Anand Dass, Director of Mixed Reality Apps at Meta, was effusive as he shared stats to illustrate Meta’s progress: $2B spent in the Quest Store, 500 titles on Quest, one fifth for MR, and more than $10M earned by 20 developers.

“Today we are excited to announce for the first time at AWE, The Meta Quest lifestyle app accelerator,” Dass announced to applause. “This is a brand new six-month program for Quest developers and Founders to prototype new lifestyle experiences with mixed reality and AI. We want to support Founders who are interested in building fun retentive engaging consumer experiences that leverage the superpowers of the meta Quest platform in emerging lifestyle categories like food and art and music and crafts and dating and fashion and beauty and things that we haven’t even thought about.” The accelerator provides seed stage funding for prototyping, access to technical product and design resources, and dedicated mentorship.

Snap CTO Bobby Murphy again delivered its keynote and participated in the fireside chat with ARtillery principal Mike Boland and Paige Piskin, an AR artist whose clients include Netflix, Warner, and L’Oréal. Murphy’s talk was primarily about the evolving Generative AI tools in Snap Lens Studio, their proprietary game engine. He first reviewed the many advances in mobile AR, the tools Snap has already made, and the billion user generated experiences that have been the result. “We want to put AI out there in the world,” he said. Creators can now prompt GenAI images inside Lens Studio. Previously users had to go to Turbosquid or Epic Games’ Sketchfab to choose assets for AR experiences.

Connell Gauld, Zappar’s CTO, demonstrated a major upgrade to their Zap.works AR game engine, now called Mattercraft, which is a browser-based 3D content development environment It’s a no code, WebXR development tool that represents a significant upgrade in the 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 eyewear maker, says his company now has 45% of the AR glasses market. They’ve had the most success with the Air 2, which is a screen reflector that tethers to your smartphone and projects its screen as a 200” display seen from several feet away. XReal introduced the Beam Pro, a dedicated $200 Android device made specifically for its headset. It sports dual cameras, allowing stereography like the Vision Pro.

Palmer Lucky, founder of Oculus, is the main attraction at any show he attends, particularly AWE. People trailed 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’s first AWE appearance since 2018, and it fit nicely into the historic theme of this 15th annual show. As a speaker, Lucky is even more of a rock star. The man is a sound bite machine.

“When you’re a whiz kid, everyone wants to talk to you. When you’re a whiz man, nobody cares.” – Palmer Lucky

Lucky had promised on X that he would reveal details on his next headset at AWE, so the room was packed at his fireside chat with Darshan Shankar, founder and CEO of Bigscreen, and VR director Stephanie Riggs.

“My strong opinion is 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 this in my early career so much. One of the reasons John Carmak was willing to talk to me is because I was a nineteen year old kid. When you’re a whiz kid, everyone wants to talk to you. When you’re a whiz man, nobody cares.”

Lucky made good on his promised disclosure 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 was an extension of Anduril’s defense work. His comments around the ten year old prototype DK-1 allowed him to emphasize, as Inbar had, the success of VR over the past decade. Overinflated expectations are the problem, Lucky said. “People don’t understand how far things have come.”

Returning to the history theme, legendary University of Washington Professor Tom Furness gave a talk about his long history with VR, going all the way back to 1966, when he was a young lieutenant in the air force puzzling over the critical human factors in the design of fighter jets. Furness has spent his career designing what he calls “the fighter jet of the mind.”

Unfortunately, I’ve run out of time and space to delve deeper into this remarkable 15th annual XR show. As a teaser, here’s a shot of the 1999 Nintendo Virtual Boy, which is featured in AWE’s XR history museum. There is so much to see and talk about it’s impossible to fit it in one story. I’ll follow up shortly with some more of my experiences on the show floor, the Auggie Award Winners, and Best in Show Awards.

Finally, give a listen to the 200th “This Week in XR” podcast, recorded live on AWE’s expo stage on Thursday, June 20. The pod features co-hosts Professor Charlie Fink, and studio executive 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. On the podcast Haskins, in her third year as program director, shares the challenges of pulling a conference together, and her remarkable personal journey.

More on AWE 2024

AWE 2024: All the AR, VR and Haptic Experiences at Augmented World Expo (David Lumb/CNet)

AWE Gets Underway in Long Beach (Dean Takahashi/Venture Beat)

I Used Meta Ray-Ban Glasses & Apple Vision Pro To Cover 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: Hands-on Freeaim walking shoes, some pictures of WEART new gloves… and a selfie with a giant chicken! (Tony Vitillo/Skarred Ghost)

AWE: Hands-on haptic gloves HaptX, a test of Varjo Teleport, and Palmer Luckey’s announcement! (Tony Vitillo/Skarred Ghost)