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The 15th Extended World Expo (AWE) took place in Long Beach this week. The mixed reality (MR) of the Oculus Quest and Apple Vision Pro and the rise of mobile AR tools dominated the show, with AI having a remarkably low profile. So much for my prediction that he will dominate the show.

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 Luckey, a wonderful XR museum, the first 101 members of the AWE Hall of Fame, and the annual Auggie Awards show. There were 300 exhibitors at the show, with a strong showing from mixed reality entertainment content developers.

AWE traditionally kicks off with a “State of the XR Alliance” keynote from co-founder and CEO, Ori Inbar, which usually involves a technical sleight of hand. This year he took to the stage with Vision Pro and repeatedly used face filters to add humor and flair to his lively twenty-minute keynote.

Inbar highlighted the growth of the industry. A slide that estimated the growing market for XR at $35 billion this year, according to ARTillery Intelligence, drew cheers from the audience and exhortations like “the time is now!” from Inbar.

Inbar ended his talk with a nice bit of low-key humor, presenting a slide of his predictions for the XR industry in 2014, the most outlandish of which was global adoption of over one billion handsets by 2023.

Tuesday morning also featured top sponsors and announcements coming from Niantic, Qualcomm, Snap and Zappar for mobile AR and spatial computing production tools. Niantic, the company behind the hit PokemonGo, has opened its Niantic Studio with WebXR. No app download required. It works 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 Scaniverse. Using a new technique called Guasian Splatting, the scanning app takes volumetric imaging in seconds using the smartphone’s cameras and AI running locally on the device. This is a killer category. No one at Vol Cap can compete with something this fast, free and high quality.

Jamie Keen opened the Meta keynote with examples of successful MR applications in enterprise and education, highlighting that VR’s killer application is training and simulation, using nursing as an example of its application in higher education.

Echoing Inbar, Anand Das, director of mixed reality applications at Meta, was ecstatic as he shared 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 earned by 20 developers.

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

Snap CTO Bobby Murphy again delivered his 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 focused on 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 billions of user-generated experiences that have resulted. “We want to put AI into the world,” he said. Creators can now suggest GenAI images in Lens Studio. Previously, users had to go to Turbosquid or Epic Games’ Sketchfab to select 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 development tool, WebXR, which represents a significant upgrade in capabilities in animation, transparent video, world tracking, and device capability. Works with headphones too.

Chi Xu, founder and CEO of XReal, the most popular and successful manufacturer of AR glasses, says his company already has 45% of the AR glasses market. They’ve had the most success with the Air 2, which is a screen reflector that connects to your smartphone and projects its screen as a 200-inch display seen from several feet away. XReal has unveiled the Beam Pro, a $200 Android device made specifically for its headset. It has dual cameras enabling stereography like Vision Pro.

Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus, is the main attraction at every show he attends, especially AWE. People trailed behind him on the show hoping for a selfie. Lucky was a good entertainer, chatting with any of the dozens of people who approached him.

This was Lucky’s first AWE appearance since 2018 and fit well with the historical theme of this 15th annual show. As a speaker, Lucky is even more of a rock star. Man is a sound machine.

“When you’re a smart kid, everyone wants to talk to you. When you’re a smartass, nobody cares.” – Palmer Luckey

Lucky had promised X that he would 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 strong 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 greatly from that in my early career. One of the reasons John Carmack wanted to talk to me was because I was a nineteen-year-old kid. When you’re a smart kid, everyone wants to talk to you. When you’re smart, nobody cares.”

Lucky delivered the 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 was an extension of Anduril’s defense work. His comments surrounding the ten-year-old DK-1 prototype allowed him to highlight, like Inbar, 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 subject of history, legendary University of Washington professor Tom Furness gave a lecture on his long history with VR, going all the way back to 1966, when he was a young lieutenant in the Air Force puzzled about the critical human factors in combat aircraft design . Furness has spent his career designing what he calls the “warplane of the mind.”

Unfortunately, I ran out of time and space to delve deeper into this remarkable 15th Annual XR Show. As a teaser, here’s a photo of a Nintendo Virtual Boy from 1999 that was featured in 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’ll follow up soon with some more of my experiences on the show floor, Auggie Award winners, 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 floor includes co-hosts Professor Charlie Fink and Studio CEO Ted Schillowitz, with special guests AWE Program Director Sonia Haskins, developer and blogger, Tony Vitillo, Cosmo Scharf, founder of VRLA, and Jenny Lowry, founder of Eye-Q Productions . In the podcast, Haskins, in her third year as program director, shares the challenges of putting a conference together 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 begins in Long Beach (Dean Takahashi/Venture Beat)

I used Meta Ray-Ban and Apple Vision Pro glasses 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: Practical Freeaim walking shoes, some pictures of new WEART gloves… and a selfie with a giant chicken! (Tony Vitillo/Scarred Ghost)

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