The Winners of the AWE EU 2018 Auggie Breakthrough Awards

VR First
XR Bootcamp
Published in
3 min readOct 23, 2018

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VR First and the Auggie Breakthrough Finalists

VR First teamed up with AWE at the 3rd annual AWE EU , Europe’s #1 conference and expo dedicated to XR, to bring the Auggie Breakthrough Categories, initiated by VR First. The event officially wrapped on 19 October 2018 by paying tribute to Europe’s most exciting XR innovations with the Auggie Award celebration.

Based on VR First’s academic industry network, this year’s European Auggie Awards featured an expanded program to include nominations for innovative XR projects which featured academia-industry collaboration in three new breakthrough categories: “Most Innovative Breakthrough”, “Most Impactful Breakthrough” and an outstanding “Woman XR Laureate.”

With these new categories, VR First being one of the organizers along with AWE, IEEE, and XR Circles, we seek to draw special attention to collaborative efforts between industry and academia that have the potential to lead to breakthroughs in the popular adoption of immersive technologies.

Initially there were 113 projects, from the world’s top universities and companies, running for the Auggie Breakthrough Awards , all chosen from VR First’s XR First Innovation Platform. We were proud and excited to bring such a broad range of excellent projects from different industrial backgrounds and from so many different countries.

“Each Auggie nominee, finalist and winner at this year’s AWE EU show not only illustrated the robust and industrious spirit of the XR industry, but also echoed the collaboration between business and academia that is the engine behind this community’s skyrocketing growth,” said Ori Inbar, founder and producer of AWE. “From “Breakthroughs” to the “Best of” contenders–we’ve never seen a field with such talent or exemplary degree of solution maturity as today.”

Auggie Breakthrough Award Winners

The winners of the Auggie Awards

Most Innovative Breakthrough was awarded to Virtual Reality Vision Therapy VERVE (Virtual Eye Rotation Vision Exercises) by OculoMotor Technologies, NJIT, Salus University, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, New Jersey Health Foundation, National Science Foundation. Read more about VERVE on their Medium article.

The winners of the Most Innovative Breakthrough Award, Dr Tara Alvarez and John Vito d'Antonio-Bertagnolli, together with Ori Inbar and Mark Billinghurst

Most Impactful Breakthrough was awarded to Virtual Reality Flight Simulator for Surgery by FundamentalVR , Kings College London, Mayo Clinic, University College Hospital London, Imperial College London, UCLA, 3D Systems, Figment Productions. To learn more about this project, take a look at their Medium article.

The winner of the Most Impactful Breakthrough Award, Dr John Vincent together with Ori Inbar and Michael Pell

Women XR Laureate was awarded to Dr. Tara Alvarez, head of VERVE project.

The winner of the Women XR Laureate Awards, Dr Tara Alvarez, together with Ori Inbar and Ioanna Matei

In addition to the Breakthrough Awards, AWE’s annual Best in Show Awards for AR, VR and Overall were selected based on popular vote at the show.

Best in Show — AR presented by Atheer: XMReality

Best in Show — VR: Koliseum Soccer VR

Best in Show — Overall: Vuzix

To become a part of similar VR /AR prospective events and endeavours, make sure to join the XR First Innovation Platform.

Interested to find out what the world’s largest community of XR innovators could achieve? Take a look at our Medium article here.

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