It’s been a heavy period, but I managed to survive :P, and now I’m ready to travel again! Today I’m departing to go to France to do some business meetings (and offer a pain au chocolat to my colleague Fabio), and then I’ll get back to the USA to attend AWE 2022!
Last year it was my first time at AWE, and I had lots of fun at it. I met lots of peers I only knew from the social media, I had some meaningful conversations, I embarrassed some other attendees by greeting them and screaming “I’m a fan of yours!”, I hugged friends, I ate a lot of free food (not as tasty as the Italian one… but free food is free food!), I tried some crazy hardware… I really had a great time there. For this reason, I’m coming back again. And I want it to be even better than last year! Expect from it a lot of coverage, pictures, photos… I will report it with my usual style, trying to make you feel as if you were there with me… let’s say it will be a kind of virtual reality for you reading my articles, the most ancient one, the one just made by words (but please, don’t call it the “wordaverse”…)
Since I will spend a lot of time to travel to the Land Of Freedom, I will stay there some days more: I will arrive in the US a few days before the event, staying at first in LA and then in SF. I will depart after the event, which will be held in Santa Clara on June, 1-3. I’m eager to meet interesting people and try interesting hardware, so if you want to meet me, shoot me an e-mail! I’m telling you now because I’m known to be pretty slow in answering… so the sooner I know, the better! It’s a pity when I go to these events that I don’t manage to meet everyone I would like to meet because the time is always so short and the things to do so many, but I will do my best.
Coming back to talking about AWE, I’ll not be there just as part of the press, but also as a speaker. I’ll speak on June, 1st at 12pm PT about the work I’m doing at VRrOOm in trying to offer cutting-edge VR live shows and events, giving you suggestions on how you can prepare your VR event as a boss. As usual, I’ll try not to have a commercial speech, but to be informative. And as usual, I will try to look very professional, while inside I’ll feel like this
Since I always think about you, I have also this nice discount code in case you want to attend AWE: type SPKR22D and you get a 20% off your ticket! But it only works if you never said “metaverses” in your life, otherwise the website cancels the discount :P.
Jokes apart, sometimes people ask me if it is worth going to AWE. My answer is, as always, it depends. AWE has an audience that is mostly technical and business. There are many XR geeks, journalists, influencers, and investors hanging around. The event is well made, and you meet there many interesting people from the American XR community. You can try some new hardware. These are the good reasons to come. Anyway, it is not an event where to expect the hottest announcements (I mean, I don’t expect the Apple XR headset to be released at AWE), it is not a huge event (it is not the SXSW) and it has not all the newest tech prototypes (there are some of them, but not at the crazy level of CES). Plus it is more of an event for those who are already in the XR communities, so if you are looking for customers that are outside of our circles (e.g. construction companies who may use a VR training solution), this is not the place where you find them.
Summarizing, let’s say that it is a high-quality medium-sized event focused on XR: if this is what you are looking for, it may be worth attending. As a blogger and XR techie, I’ve found it worth going last year, and what I took home were especially two things: as a blogger, some interesting experiences to talk about in my articles, and as a VR developer/tech lead some good connections with important people from our XR ecosystem. This is the reason I’m going back: I’m sure I will meet new interesting people that will be useful for my work, and hopefully, will be also good to just hang out with.
Wish me a safe journey and good luck! See you in the USA!
(Header image by the AWE team)