A short personal recap of the European edition of AWE 2024 by Zoltan Batho G
– Snap Inc.‘s new Spectacles were finally showcased here in Europe, and they will be available for developers in six EU countries (Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Austria and The Netherlands). I had the opportunity to try it out as well, the brand new Snap OS is quite user friendly, the visual quality is great, but I still don’t like the very limited FOV.
– Quite a few of the presentations were about design thinking, do’s and dont’s for XR, it feels that the industry is still discovering what works and what doesn’t, from economic, health, user experience, and operational point of views. Follow David Gochfeld and Lisa Lokshina to learn more of these topics.
– Also, there were a lot of discussions about Avatars, whether they should aim for hyper realism (with a high chance of ending up in the uncanny valley) or more like to be representativ. Aparently, a ~80% realism usually does a great job in most use cases. Victor Erukhimov is your specialist to get further information on this.
– AI and XR, what else. Let’s not even get too much into this… Still very early days, overhyped, use cases to be found, ethical issues, etc. Definitely follow Andrea Bravo, PhD, Patrick Grady, Cai Felip, Chad Wollen, Marine Boulot, Iveta Lohovska, Jeannette Gorzala, Amone Gbedemah, Ricard Gras, Christian Venables to stay up-to-date in this topic.
– Education and XR – this is still something we should try to take to the next level, there is a huge untapped potential in this topic, especially as some of the traditional forms of educational materials are getting to a point where they no longer work anymore with the new generations. Follow Monica Arés if you want to know more about the future of human centered learning ecosystems.
– Meta‘s Quest 3 seems to be the overall winner as the mostly used VR headset and for a reason. I still find this headset the best in terms of price/tech. Also, I tried the Meta/Ray Ban smart glass, and that was the only pair of glasses I would wear during the day (ok, it’s not an AR glass, so this is not a fair comparison…). As soon as AR glasses will get close to that form factor, I am all in to wear a pair of glasses…
