Few Shocks, Plenty Of AWE As Immersive Industry Ventures To LBC

It took 15 years, but the Augmented World Expo – probably the immersive tech industry’s most important annual gathering – finally ventured out of the Bay Area’s protective cocoon to Long Beach, Calif., to showcase the latest products and hardware in what’s been a very bumpy business most of this century.

Around 2018, immersive experiences seemed like the hottest thing out there. Lots of startups had lots of ideas, the ultra-secretive Magic Leap raised more than $2 billion, and plenty of other hopefuls found plenty of investment capital too.

Then the industry pulled back in visibility, investment, and stability, partly a victim of hardware and business models that weren’t quite ready for prime time, partly the ravages of the pandemic, especially for the out-of-home immersive-entertainment venues that had popped up around the country.

That pandemic-fueled pullback didn’t keep Facebook from changing its name to Meta in 2021, and betting tens of billions of dollars on an immersive metaverse-style future.

But the industry has continued to face challenges, in part thanks to the distractions and fervor since late 2022 for all things artificial intelligence. Even the arrival in February of Apple’s pricey but prodigiously capable Vision Pro immersive headset (I’m writing this story while wearing one) hasn’t kept Apple or any other tech giant from diving into the deep end of the AI pool.

But AWE, as the expo is known, proved last week to be a useful counterbalance to the negative narrative about the state of immersive. Some 6,000 attendees flooded the Long Beach Convention Center, a substantial though not overwhelming conference hall 25 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, to attend more than 500 panels and keynotes, and check out the wares of more than 300 exhibitors.

Want an app to train construction workers on how to operate a “cherry picker,” an exceedingly cool and useful but also potentially dangerous piece of equipment? There’s an app for that, from ForgeFX Simulations.

How about tactics to survive an active-shooter crisis in workplaces and schools? Sisu VR showed an app designed to help “transform compliance and safety training,” CEO and founder Jocelyn Tan said, for what’s become a regrettably badly needed service.

Infinite Rabbit Holes showed off its hybrid augmented-reality board game The Arkham

Arkham
Asylum Files, which debuted last fall based on the Batman franchise. It’s a more interesting storytelling venture than most of Warner Bros. Discovery’s recent films in the franchise (though hope remains for Colin Farrell, unrecognizable in the upcoming The Penguin series, not to be confused with his turn in The Lobster). Separately, the company has a second AR experience coming based on Alice in Wonderland.

IRH CEO Susan Bonds also showed off the special card-table-sized displays her company created for Costco locations that allow salespeople there to demonstrate how a player could use their tablet or smartphone to trigger augmented-reality experiences with the game’s various cards, documents, three-dimensional game board/cityscape and more. That’s the kind of marketing ground game in consumer-facing venues that these kinds of experiences need to find a bigger audience.

FreeAim offered up unique hardware, VR boots that track foot movements. Applications include training, games, health care/rehab and more, executives said. The company has rounded up enough pre-seed funding to begin production.

Other haptic input devices of varying exotic nature were also on display, from companies such as SenseGlove, whose haptic gloves provide a far wider array of touch-related feedback, including the feel of actually holding something you’ve virtually picked up.

Meta, Sony, Unity, and Magic Leap all had significantly large booths, and Meta even had a relatively big announcement.

The company that renamed itself for an immersive future will use a well-thumbed playbook, i.e., money and other resources, to encourage creative minds to make stuff for its platform. It’s a playbook that’s worked for YouTube, Snap, and Facebook, among other platforms over the past dozen years or so.

The twist announced on the conference’s first day: Meta will help creators on its platform find investment capital. Smart, though creators depending on Meta to give them pride of place should also remember the company’s long and problematic history pulling the rug out from under creators, publishers and other partners such as Zynga with algorithmic shifts that walloped their bottom lines.

Apple didn’t have a booth at the show, but its shadow loomed over much of the expo. A pre-conference day-long workshop on creating apps and experiences for the Apple Vision Pro, though attendees said it devolved into a series of case studies on the pain of developing on a new platform under Apple’s extremely critical eye.

And there was plenty of news to digest about the Vision Pro itself, initially from Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference the week before, and then at AWE. Four months after the Vision Pro’s release, Apple said the next version of the operating system will arrive this fall, and will reportedly fix many of Version 1.0’s most annoying interface quirks. Thank goodness.

Perhaps more consequentially, given the cooling buzz around the $3,499 headset, Apple said it will roll out the AVP in nine major markets beyond the United States. And word came out that Apple is killing development of a second high-end version of the headset in favor of a less expensive, presumably less capable model. Call it the Air companion to the Pro, to use Apple’s usual hardware nomenclature.

Apple clearly is reacting both to complaints about the size and weight of the AVP and the many competitors rolling out less capable but lower-cost headsets that are considerably less tiresome to wear for extended periods.

At AWE, Xreal showed off a phone-sized device that not only provides power, storage and playback for its lightweight glasses, but also can capture stereoscopic video. The Xreal Pro device is technically a tablet that can control the glasses and provide other capabilities. And the Xreal Pro costs about one-tenth of the AVP.

And while the expo unspooled over three days, there came news of potentially important new venue, courtesy of Netflix. The streaming giant said it will open permanent retail attractions featuring immersive experiences based on its big franchises such as Bridgerton and Stranger Things, beginning with cavernous former department-store spaces in two of the country’s most popular malls in Dallas and suburban Philadelphia.

It’s ironic that the company best known for helping kill the movie theater while turning Americans into Netflix-and-chill couch potatoes is now investing in out-of-home experiences. But it also represents a smart extension of the company’s experiments in recent years with traveling immersive experiences based on some of those same franchises.

The company plunked down at the Century City Mall in the heart of Los Angeles sprawl with an elaborate zombie-killing experience based on director Zack Snyder’s 2021 hit feature Army of the Dead. A specially outfitted gaming platform that looked like the movie’s ice cream truck held a half-dozen players at a time. Each player was outfitted with headsets, haptic vests and VR guns, and virtually blasted their way through waves of zombies besieging Las Vegas, capped by zombie versions of a fake Elvis on horseback, and a Siegfried and Roy-style zombie tiger.

It’s not hard to see experiences like that remaining durable attractions as part of a bigger experience. And the mall setting, as one observer pointed out this week, is perfect for a recreation of key battles at the end of one of Stranger Things’ seasons.