The State Of The ARt At AWE 18

The 9th annual Augmented World Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center, May 29th to June 1st, 2018, was a celebration of AR's progress. Watershed events, like the introduction of ARKit from Apple in September 2017, have spurred innovation. Mobile AR is very hot. Most of the glasses look dorky, though some are slimming down. The dorky ones were by far the most popular. The bigger story, however, is how fast the enterprise segment is growing as applications as straightforward as schematics on a head-mounted monocular microdisplay are transforming manufacturing, assembly, and warehousing. Tom Emrich, Programmer of AWE and a partner in Super Ventures, delivered his dramatic keynote AWE using motion capture technology. For AWE's co-founder and Executive Producer, Ori Inbar, the Conference was nothing less than a victory lap. With Microsoft and Qualcomm among the Gold Sponsors, there was a palpable smell of vindication in the air.