The leading tech conference on AR and VR previews the future of spatial computing and robotics.

Courtesy of AWE

Last week the Augmented World Expo (AWE) conference took place in Long Beach, California. I had a chance to attend what the promoters bill as the “world’s #1 XR and AI community, helping connect, educate, and enable commercial growth and market adoption for 5,000+ companies and 80,000+ professionals in the ecosystem.”

There were so many exciting innovations on display with products spanning robotics, wearables, physical AI, plus breakthroughs in the realms of Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR) and Virtual Reality (VR).

What follows is a wrap-up of the event as seen through the lens of the various companies I spoke to.

Company Name: XREAL

Products and Services Offered: A pioneer in the spatial computing space, XREAL’s mission is to “build augmented reality for everyone.” The company is pursuing this goal with a line of lightweight augmented reality glasses, including its forthcoming flagship, XREAL AURA, developed in close collaboration with Google’s Android XR platform and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors.

Quote from a Representative: “From day one we set out to build lightweight glasses, and we’re this close to the iPhone moment for this industry,” said Chi Xu, Founder and CEO. “Smart glasses will become the future of the laptop. The one killer use case is a 24/7 assistant that sees through these lenses, learns your habits, and understands you. Twenty years from now, people will look back and say XREAL made history with this vision.”

Company Name: Wearable Devices Ltd

Products and Services Offered: Mudra Band and Mudra Link offer neural connections between wrist-worn devices for brain-computer interfaces. Their products facilitate a touch-free control of digital devices. The company says its “software platform is designed to leverage generative AI that allows developers to create, test, and deploy gesture-based neural input experiences using text prompts. It provides the AI interaction layer to scale Mudra across third-party devices.”

Quote from a Representative: “Neural input can become a practical control layer for AI and extended reality ‘XR’ devices, just as controllers and camera-based gestures have shaped today’s XR interfaces,” according to Guy Wagner, Founder, President and Chief Scientist. “Mudra is designed to let users express intent naturally, and that matters more than ever as smart glasses with spatial awareness become the primary interface with AI agents and platforms.”

Company Name: RP1

Products and Services Offered: RP1 and the Metaverse Standards Forum launched the Open Metaverse Browser Initiative, an open-source project to build a standards-based browser engine for spatial computing and browsing, one that can be embedded into today's web browsers as well as standalone Metaverse browsers.

Quote from a Representative: “Now that we’re in the 'AOL era' of spatial computing, walled gardens and fragmentation are holding everyone back," said Sean Mann, co-founder and CEO. "If your company is building XR content, you're forced to work with companies that don't share the same standards yet. We're building those standards. Soon, you'll walk through the real-world wearing AR glasses connected to spatial fabrics, ushering in the next evolution of websites and anchored services. These will be the software of tomorrow, running everything from airports to hospitals and AI to robotics. As a force for decentralizing and democratizing the metaverse, we intend for anyone, anywhere to be able to join someone in the real world and instantly interact in mass co-presence.”

Company Name: HarmonEyes

Products and Services Offered: Powered by AI, HarmonEyes’ Theia^TM is an eye-tracking platform that produces real-time read-outs of people’s cognitive and physiological states. It is meant to assist with determining fatigue and mental readiness, particularly in taxing professions such as long-distance driving. A boon for training and simulations, the tool can infer the brain’s capabilities in any given moment.

Quote from a Representative: "Together we are giving XR teams something neither of us could deliver alone: a real-time understanding of a user's cognitive state from Theia, shown alongside the behavioral insights Cognitive3D already captures so teams can see how their cognitive state maps to the specific tasks and decisions in a session," said Adam Gross, CEO and Co-Founder. "We see it as a foundational step toward making cognitive performance intelligence a standard part of how high-stakes training is validated."

Company Name: Chameleon Studios

Products and Services Offered: An immersive virtual reality experience that teaches underprivileged youth the practical career skills of electrical theory and hands-on problem-solving through the video game The Castle set in the realm of Frankenstein.

Quote from a Representative: “This is a love project designed to help kids envision electrical concepts taught through story-driven environments,” said Managing Partner Cecil Colvin. “Imagine a man named Nigel Kupferman, enthralled by the book Frankenstein, who uses his fortune to buy a castle and reenact the experiments. This is where our player enters. Nigel offers auditory guidance as players solve basic electrical problems grounded in real theory. The heart of the matter is that so many American students have a hard time succeeding academically. Percentages vary, but roughly one in ten kids don’t graduate high school. And of those who do, many shy away from STEAM-topics simply because they don’t understand it. That is exactly what we are trying to solve.”

Company Name: UON Social

Products and Services Offered: a smart glasses augmented reality application that shares real-time status and location information to wearers, promoting a modern form of dating through spatial technologies. Users receive an overlay to see who nearby is open to meeting, networking or romantically interacting.

Quote from a Representative: “We’re not trying to take you away from the moment,” said CEO Luis Contreras. “We want to connect you to it. Most people meet on apps and build a nice rapport digitally, but in person there’s a disconnect. We want to start with in-person chemistry and build from there. The hardest thing about meeting people is knowing whether they actually want to be approached, and this app tells you. Imagine you’re at a stadium looking for romance. You might walk by someone displaying an emoji along with whatever part of their bio they choose to share. Right away, you know they’re open to chatting, because they had to actively turn that feature on.”

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Longtime AWE PR Director and Lightspeed PR/M CEO Ethan Rasiel was on hand to share his view of the event’s growth, now in its 17th year: “AWE has gone from showing the potential of AR and VR, to proving what spatial computing and robotics can do right now, today, for real benefit. We drew more than 200 journalists this year, our biggest turnout since 2019, and the message I kept hearing was that AWE is the one event they can't afford to miss."