AR and VR Highlights from Augmented World Expo (AWE) 2018
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The ninth annual Augmented World Expo (AWE 2018) was the largest ever. Strolling through the show floor, it’s clear the AR and VR industries are alive and well if you know where to look. At the same time that the industry is bemoaning the slow adoption of mainstream VR headsets from Oculus and Vive, literally thousands of vertical market applications are being deployed across many industries. The show’s highlights were a mix of some amazing targeted applications and some great new technologies aimed at the broader consumer audience. Here are some of those that stood out to me.
AR could potentially put physical interaction back into digital games for kids. Animaker lets you create an animal out of LEGO, and then interact with software that will bring it to (virtual) life.
Motion capture suits aren't new, but until now they've been unwieldy and expensive. The HoloSuit aims to change all that, with a $1,000 version with 26 on-body sensors and a $1,500 version that adds finger tracking.
Setting up VR tracking in large rooms is a lot of work. With StarTracker you can simply place reflective stickers on the ceiling (or a net). Then a camera on each headset calculates exactly where it is. Currently used for tracking cameras in broadcast studios, it's being extended to support more general VR applications.
Prezi AR aims not just to save audiences from boring Powerpoint presentations, but to re-imagine how we can be part of our own presentations. You can put a live view of yourself in the background of every slide.
One of the simplest apps on display is one of the most clever, and I think useful. Vuforia Chalk offers over-the-shoulder remote coaching using your smartphones. It's available for iOS 11 and in beta for Android — although not all versions of Android seem to be supported yet.
Holocap isn't a type of headwear. It's innovative software that uses a standard Kinect camera to create a front-facing 3D image of a subject for use in VR and AR environments. You can't see behind or around the person, but in many cases a front view is enough.
There has been a lot of interest in HTC's new inside-out tracking, but Stereolabs continued to show it has a superior offering with lower latency. To showcase the technology the company was demoing multi-player VR games using only inside-out tracking, including Ping-Pong.
There were too many different versions of AR glasses on display to count them all, let alone write about them. But only a few companies make the components that drive the industry forward. One of them is Lumus, who was showing off a 1080p wave guide system called Lumus Vision for AR glass designs. I gave it a try and was stunned by the image quality. No screen-dooring like with most VR headsets, and a much wider field of view than the current version of Microsoft's HoloLens. It definitely shows we'll be treated to much-improved AR products over the coming years.
You couldn't go anywhere at the show without seeing a Vuforia logo. Long one of the best toolkits for vision-related development, application leader PTC purchased it from Qualcomm and has turned it into an AR development powerhouse. It supports Android, iOS, and UWP, including a variety of development tools.