AWE 2021: my first impressions about AWE and hands-on with Ray-Ban Stories!

Hello everyone from Santa Clara, USA! Today I have had my first day at AWE, so let me tell you how has been my experience here ! I also had a short hands-on session with Ray-Ban Stories, and I want to tell you about it, too…

First impressions about AWE

AWE US is one of the most important XR events, and this year it has been the first major XR event coming back to a physical version, so many people joined it because they wanted to hug people and shake hands again.

For me, it has been my first time at AWE and in the US in general. And my first impression is that this is an event with a great energy. I mean, there are some speeches from amazing people (today I assisted to a talk by the CEO of Niantic!), but the real good deal is the networking. Wherever I looked there were fantastic people I knew from the XR communities: most of the celebrities of our ecosystem were all there! I made pictures with Charlie Fink, Cathy Hackl, Alan Smithson, Matt Miesnieks, Philip Rosedale, Avi Bar-Zeev, Lucas Rizzotto, Ori Inbar, and tons of others!

Sometimes I was walking in a corridor and someone stopped me because he/she recognized me. It was literally insane! Everyone was happy, everyone wanted to hug, everyone wanted to talk about augmented and virtual reality. It was a non-stop meeting. And then it was funny that driven by the enthusiasm, I stopped people that I esteem and I did literally that by physically blocking them and saying their name out loud… something like “Hey JOHN DOE, JOHN DOE, I’m Tony, nice to meet you, YOU ARE DOING AMAZING THINGS IN YOUR SECTOR, I LOVE YOU, YOU ARE AMAZING”. And it was fun seeing in their eyes an expression that looked like “Who the fuck are you??? Why are you speaking with me???”, but they didn’t want to say that, so they just replied with “oh, ah, thanks, yeah” and then they invented whatever excuse to run away faster than Roadrunner. When speaking with one guy, I told him “I interviewed you some time ago, do you remember me?” And he answered “ABSOLUTELY NO”, but then after a while, he remembered that one day he spoke with a guy with a weird website name with the word “ghost” in it. Well, I guess it’s something. The fun of real events is that you can do crazy things and have fun with it.

I mean, if you are audacious enough, you can literally stop everyone and start talking… and then when you are talking with someone, most probably another person comes and starts talking with the other person, then you start speaking between three people, and you get to know a new person. It’s fantastic. Also during the evening, there are lots of parallel events happening that give you even more possibilities for networking. For instance, today after AWE there was a nice party organized by Qualcomm, and you could go there and meet other key people in our sector.

That’s probably the most important feature of the event: people from all over the United States are coming, and also people from all parts of the world are coming (I just got here from Italy), and this is amazing if you want to enlarge your community. Networking was super easy and very efficient for me.

Tomorrow the gates of the expo areas are opening… I had already a look inside the space, and it seems I will have a very busy day trying solutions from Tilt Five, AR House, Pico, HaptX, and many other companies! It seems that two days won’t be enough to try all the cool stuff that are there! I literally can’t wait.

My talk about HitMotion: Reloaded

Today I had also may talk where I gave people some hints on how to build their own fitness XR game thanks to the lessons learned while building our game HitMotion: Reloaded. I think I could have done a better job with the presentation, but in the end, people told me it wasn’t that bad. Unluckily, I had my speech at the same time that Tom Emrich was speaking on the main stage, and he is like a superstar, so most people went listening to him in another room and didn’t come to listen to me. Actually, Tom is so cool that I thought about stepping down the stage and go listening to him as well myself. Jokes apart, when you speak in this kind of events, the timing of your talk is important to understand how many people will come to listen to you and how much they will be interested. So, be careful about that.

I was quite nervous about my talk, but everything went well in the end. The only problem for me is that I am looking for a publisher for our game, but this event is not much about gaming, so it’s harder to find connections in this environment. It’s better on the business/marketing/hardware side.

Hands-on Ray-Ban Stories

This morning, Eloi Gerard, the great marketing guy that is the admin of the XR Story group on WeChat, came to take me up at my Airbnb house. I noticed he was wearing a pair of Ray-Ban Stories sunglasses, so I asked him to try them for a few minutes. It’s funny that he also gifted me an American bandana, so with the sunglasses and the stars-and-stripes bandana, I really looked like a crazy American guy!

But let’s back to the Ray-Ban Stories glasses and my impressions while using them. Trying them is like an anti-climax moment because you put them on your head and they’re like… sunglasses. They don’t feel special at all, you don’t see any kind of augmentations… they’re just regular Ray-Ban sunglasses, lightweight and fashionable.

You turn them on using a little switch installed on the frames. Then you can use a button, or the sentence “Hey Facebook, take a picture” to take immediately a picture. Regarding vocal commands, it was cool that:

• The system immediately understood me, even if I have a strong italian accent
• It was only listening to me, and if Eloi was saying “take a picture” while I was wearing the glasses, it was not working
• There was some audio feedback, so I could understand that the system had actually correctly interpretated what I said, and it was taking action.

I’ve found the user experience very polished. I also tried listening to some music from the phone, and the audio quality was darn good: I was impressed with the quality of the audio I was listening too even if the speakers were so small and lightweight. I guess it’s great to use these glasses while you are running around and listening to some motivating music.

I tested Ray-Ban Stories only for five minutes or such, but my impression is that it is a very solid product. I mean, it has very few functionalities, but those few ones are implemented in a very polished way. Really kudos to Meta and Luxottica for this product: it’s not my piece of cake because I want more features and I want to see 3D augmentations, but if you are looking for a nice glass to shoot photos and videos and listen to music, then it’s worth considering.

The fact that they are good is reflected by the fact that among the visitors of AWE there were at least 3-4 people wearing them on their faces. The number of the other smartglasses that the people were wearing is zero. This shows that this product has an edge because it is something that people have no problem wearing in public.

And that’s it for my first impressions about AWE. In the next two days, I am going to try so many things in the expo area, and it will be a lot of fun. But don’t expect me to write every day about everything I tried that day: most probably I am going to write just about a few experiences, and then I’ll keep the other reviews for the upcoming weeks… so expect many articles about AWE for the next two weeks. I am not going to write full reports every day because I am literally too tired: now that I’m writing this article my eyes are closing and I can’t keep them open, so it’s impossible that I write super-long articles each day… I will report about all my experiences, but I will split them into multiple articles to publish also when AWE will be over.

Ok, time to go to sleep for me now… see you tomorrow at AWE if you are here! And if you are not here… I will make you virtually travel with me through my words 😉