AWE USA brings back XR physical events

Augmented World Expo (AWE) will start on November, 9th 2021, in Santa Clara, USA. The event, which will run until the 11th, will be the first major event about AR and VR to be back in a physical location after a long time. It will be a good opportunity to return back to meeting people in person, shaking hands, and having some cool demos of AR and VR products. And also to meet me, if you want 😉 … but we will talk about this at the end of this article.

AWE has always been an important event in our ecosystem: organized by Ori Inbar, one of the most esteemed VCs in our industry, and one of the first advocates of the AR Cloud (I guess you would call it m**averse, now), AWE has always attracted representatives from major companies and top-tier speakers from all countries. Actually, AWE oversees the organization of many events all over the world (for instance, I support the great Cecilia Lascialfari in organizing her AWE Nite Florence events), but the big event in California, together with the ones in Shanghai and Munich, is probably the most important one of the association.

The event has always been a great occasion to network with other members of our community (especially the US community), see the launch of some new products, and try some innovative demos. As my friend Giovanni Landi told me, “you never know who you are going to meet at AWE”, and in fact some years ago there was Palmer Luckey wandering around, and this year there will be the co-founder of Snap among the speakers. Unluckily, last year, because of the COVID, the event was held only online, so the networking possibilities were limited… but even in this scenario, I was able to connect there with people from NVIDIA and OpenBCI, and I also met Cecilia with which I started collaborating on the events.

This year the organizers fought since the beginning to make AWE physical again, and thanks to the fact that the situation of the pandemic is getting better in the Western world, it has been possible to organize it in Santa Clara, giving it back the full power it had in the beginning. Because events on Zoom are nice, but they still lack the fascination of a physical meeting. And especially they lack free buffets, and we all love free buffets.

To make you discover AWE a bit better, and make you understand if it is worth it going for you, I had a brief interview with the boss Ori Inbar about the event, and I also asked him some pieces of advice for our XR career.

How would you describe AWE in a single sentence to people that don’t know it?

Since 2010, over 5000 companies and 50,000 professionals have trusted AWE to connect, learn and grow their business in the XR ecosystem – and now with awe.live – it’s 365 days a year.

Tell us some important names that are going to join the event this year!

The most anticipated keynote speakers are obviously John Hanke (CEO, Niantic), and Bob Murphy (Cofounder, Snap), along with top execs from Qualcomm, Unity, Magic Leap, HP, Lenovo, Meta, and many more.
We are especially proud of the enterprise end users speaking in AWE from Nike, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, T-Mobile and Deutsche Telecom, Marvel, Paramount, Lowe’s, Kohler, REI, Tesla, Toyota, The NHS, United Health…and many more!

Why have you decided to go back to a physical event and not one in VR or over Zoom? What are the opportunities it can foster?

If we learned something from nearly 2 years of Covid is that – yes, we can do so much more than we all imagined virtually, from home.
But – there are certain things that only work in person.
For instance, connecting on a deeper level, building trust, trying out new devices and demos, and above all – serendipitous discovery:  meeting people you never knew you had to meet, and having experiences you never knew you had to have. You can’t replicate the energy of an in-person conference online and truly get inspired. At least not yet 🙂

How can someone maximize the outcome of his/her networking on an event like this? How to create the best connections?

The best way to maximize your event experience is to log in to awe.live today and use the smart match-making and smart filtering to find the people, speakers, and companies you need to meet and bookmark them, schedule meetings in advance, and configure your own agenda. 
Then let serendipitous discovery do the rest and have fun at the event!

You are a VC and have been one of the first promoter of the “AR Cloud”. What do you think of this moment in XR and all this hype around the “metaverse”?

I love it! I hate it! 
On the one hand, it brought unprecedented awareness to what we do and that’s so awesome. 
On the other hand – it makes things we are already doing today feel futuristic and far off, plus when it’s a buzzword that does everything for everyone…it loses its meaning.
But overall, I love it. And hate it. No, seriously – I love it.

If you could give a piece of advice to someone that wants to do your job, what would it be?

It’s very simple, just do it: Work hard, with passion, believe in what you do, be sincere about it, try to meet and learn from as many important voices as you can, and think big – this is our lifetime opportunity to change the world!
Oh, and have patience…it’s a very long ride.

To have more info about AWE, you can head to its website and read everything about it. If after you have informed yourself, you think that you want to participate, you can use the discount code AWESPEAKER20 to have a 20% discount on the final ticket price (or if it doesn’t work, you can try this other 20% discount code by ArborXR). There is also a ticket to attend the event virtually and listen to all the talks that will happen at AWE, in case you can’t travel to the US.

That said, I’m also honored to say that I will be a speaker at AWE USA 2021! On the first day, I will have a speech called “How to Design a Fun and Effective Fitness XR Game” (more details here) in which I will detail the lessons that we of New Technology Walkers have learned while working on the fitness VR game HitMotion: Reloaded. As always, I will try to convey interesting info in my talk to be helpful to other developers, so it won’t be a commercial speech… but of course I will end it with “and now everyone please download HitMotion: Reloaded and give it 5 stars on App Lab“, because you know, a bit of promotion is always good. I’m still unsure if using a horse head to be more convincing when asking to play our game… I think I’ll decide that before going on the stage 😛 .

It will be my first time in the United States, and I will really jump on a plane the first day that the Travel Ban lifts… it will be pretty an adventure! My first three days I will be at AWE all day, but then I’m going to stay for other 5-6 days in the Silicon Valley, between Santa Clara and Palo Alto, to meet interesting people and maybe see the new logo of Meta with my eyes and ask Zuck for some of his special sauce.

My purpose for my 10 days in the US is:

• Meeting interesting people in our ecosystem
• Trying new XR gadgets and products
• Having some interviews
• Finding some publishers for our game HitMotion: Reloaded

So in case you will be in the Valley those days and/or you can help me in reaching out one of the four above goals, reach out via e-mail and let’s chat! I’m really going on an adventure, and I want to live this trip to its fullest, so… let’s make it great together! The first days Cecilia Lascialfari, Louis Cacciuttolo, and Eloi Gerard will also live close to me and will be at AWE too.. and I’ve read on Twitter that many people from the XR community are actually going there because it will be the first physical event after a long time, so I think the premises are the best for a fantastic event.

I can’t wait to be there… let’s have an AWEsome time together!

(Header image by AWE)