Prepare to Be Augmented!

Times are changing swiftly.

The industries that we know (and maybe love or hate) will be either displaced or radically changed by the forthcoming technologies we know as AR and VR.

To get all the newbies up to speed, what is AR and what is VR?

AR is Augmented Reality, which is where we take our current reality and add something to it digitally.

VR is Virtual Reality, which is where we escape our current reality and immerse ourselves in a digital one.

Now that we’re up to speed, let’s move on to the Augmented World Expo.

The Augmented World Expo is the world’s largest VR and AR conference, taking place in three locations in North America, Europe, and Asia each year. To give you an idea of how big this event was, this year’s event in Santa Clara hosted over 5,000 attendees.

The Circuit Youth team had four members representing it at the event: co-founder Brendan Clarke, VR/AR specialist and 3D scanning technician Ryan Brown, operations assistant and member David Clarke, and newsletter writer and content strategist Alex Gentry (myself). We were all given press status after Brendan contacted the AWE team and told them about Circuit Youth and delighted with our idea, they offered us as many free tickets as we needed (they’re normally $800-$900!).

After getting our Airbnb and doing research (and some insane interview prepping), we all arrived May 30th, the day before the event, completely ready to go. Day 1 (May 31st) began and we were up and fully energized!

During Day 1 we got familiar with the Santa Clara Convention Center, the expo’s location, and attended several keynote sessions (from Achin Bhowmik of Intel — “Merging the Real and the Virtual Worlds”, Zvi Greenstein of NVIDIA — “The Journey to Holodeck”, Rikard Steiber of HTC Vive — “Expanding the VR Ecosystem”), in the main stage room. Because we had yellow press badges, we could go pretty much anywhere we wanted to without having to wait like everyone who didn’t have the yellow badges. Press privilege is oh so sweet! We got to go inside the press room where we met However we went home early at 3 pm because all of us were feeling tired after the immense energy.

Day 2 (June 1st) was our most productive and longest day, as we stayed from 9 am until around 10 pm! The AWE Playground and the Exhibit Hall were both opened on Day 2 so we spent most of the day networking, interviewing, and exchanging contacts. As press we also got to use our food vouchers and had free food the entire second and third days (technically we were supposed to have it for the first day as well, but we hadn’t gotten the passes when we arrived so we had to pay for food the first day) and the food was top quality (there was a five star Hyatt hotel right next door and the tech companies had all paid for the food for the event). There was a special section for the press to eat at where lunch was being served in the middle of the Exhibit Hall the second and third days. We got invited by a man who owned a luxury motorhome that was in the AWE Playground to use it as a space to interview people. Brendan and Ryan were able to get several longer interviews in on Thursday and Friday and they also were in charge of all the more in-depth interviews while I was conducting shorter interviews from the perspective of someone new to the VR/AR industry. Philip Godwin, a producer from The Event Architects Radius Group was a significant contact we made and after Ryan and I talked to him during the secret AWE party at the Hyatt, offering to fly the entire Circuit Youth team down to Santa Clara for AWE 2018 (we have his business card).

Day 3 (June 2nd) was very productive as well, as we stayed from 10 am until 3 pm networking, interviewing, and exchanging contacts again in the AWE Playground and the Exhibit Hall.