AWE? More Like A W OW!
Hey y’all it’s your girl Janet, back at it again at the Looking Glass Factory.
In case you forgot, I’m the Community and Events Manager at Looking Glass Factory. That’s right. I’m a professional partier. It’s my job to bring the hologram parties to you. That means a bunch of different things to a bunch of different people that depends on a bunch of different stuff — for instance, whether or not you like to party, etc.
There are different types of parties. There are party parties, where we have a DJ (sup Missy), drinks, and demos we don’t generally show to the public. Then there are game jams, residencies, hackathons, create-a-thons, trade shows and conferences. We do ’em all folks.
This past month, we did a pretty huge one. AWE, aka Augmented World Expo, aka the biggest presence we’ve ever had a trade show.
Mind you — my background is in big ass shows. I used to put on music festivals. Trade shows aren’t just a different ballgame, they’re a whole other sport.
For context — we fucking LOVE AWE. Last year, it was one of the first events in which we demoed Looking Glass prototypes. In retrospect, the enthusiastic response we got was strong foreshadowing of the momentous tone that built up to the launch of the Looking Glass last June. Ah, simpler times.
We’ve grown a whole bunch since our last time at AWE. Literally — we’re moving offices at the end of this month because we physically can’t hold the amount of people we’ve hired in our office anymore (RIP 95 Commercial St). Don’t get me wrong, we’re no Axe Capital. But check back in a year, and we might be.
This year, our booth was huge. It cost a lot of money and shaved about 10 years off my life. No cute joke here. Wouldn’t trade what I’ve learned and the overall experience to get those 10 years back, but they’re definitely gone now. C’est la vie!
We had a 20x20 booth, and a sizable neon sign that you could see from the entire show floor.
You’re looking at four brand-new-never-before-seen demos and six older ones, across 11 Looking Glasses.
We had three types of Looking Glasses set up: Standard, Large, and Pro.
Oh, and haven’t you heard? We launched a frikken product during the show.
This is a video of the Looking Glass Pro: A Holographic Workstation. The Looking Glass Pro is a brand new, all-in-one holographic solution. Y’all have been asking me questions about this for a year now, so you might as well go here and learn more.
We also won an award and ran into a few Looking Glasses on the show floor!
The amount of blood, sweat and software programming that went into making this happen from concept right up to breakdown spanned over 4 months, 1,000 emails, and about 40 meetings.
I am now older, wiser, and stronger.
At the end of the day, my biggest takeaway from AWE is that I’m incredibly proud to work at Looking Glass Factory. They didn’t pay me to say that, although they are technically paying me to write this. Every single person, across both BK and HK labs, somehow touched this project. From hardware to software to customer support to biz dev, it wouldn’t have been possible, let alone GOOD, without each one of them.
Drake face Aww man, I love my team.
Xoxoxo Janet
