Michigan/Munich/St. Ingbert, 26th May 2020. The AWE USA 2020 opened its doors digitally for the leading AR/VR conference in the world. This digital expo takes place worldwide from 26th to 29th May 2020. Ori Inbar started his space-related introduction with the topic “A SPATIAL NEW WORLD” and with the sentence “Distances were eliminated during the COVID-19 crisis” and the trends from now until 2030 are being shaped by crowdsourced knowledge creation and ambient computing. And XR adoption is at an all time high!
“Since 2010, AWE’s mission has been to nurture an environment for the AR and VR industry to accelerate the adoption by the mainstream. Now that we are there, it’s time to turn our attention to the next decade. We hope you will all join us in our quest to make Spatial Computing an essential part of everyone’s life and work, and preparing society for it,” emphasizes Ori Inbar, Co-Founder AWE XR Event series and Founder of Super Ventures XR Fund.
During his speech Ori quoted a message from his future self: “Hey Ori, it’s me - your future-self from 2030. …
“Here in 2030, we are still battling major threats that are assaulting our planet…but we got lifesaving help thanks to the wide adoption of Spatial Artificial Intelligence. SPatial Artificial Intelligence (or Spai as I like to call it) is the fusion of tech including AR, VR and AI and serves as a common foundation for iOT, robotics and autonomous vehicles. This infrastructure became critical to make the world function. With SPAI, humanity has been transformed and is more equipped than ever to handle the existential crises we are facing.
As machines are inching towards human level intelligence, we try to understand what it means to be human in a machine-led world(4). Just like Kevin Kelly predicted, we are living through a constant identity crisis: what are humans for?
Humanity has changed more in the past 10 years than in all of human history!
…OK, maybe it has a touch of hyperbole, but hear me out:
Since 2020, half of all traditional colleges(5) and corporations ceased to exist and a third of all jobs are now gone(6)(7). Most lost jobs were replaced by new ones that were recently invented. And with JITT (Just In Time Training(8) based on SPAI) millions are being quickly reskilled to fill these new jobs; a process that repeats almost every 18 months. And because employees can live where they want and access any job anywhere, unemployment is at its lowest. Thanks to the productivity gains the work week has shrunk to 4 days, yay!
The new jobs rely on inherent human traits like empathy, creativity, entrepreneurship & innovation, ethics, and emotional intelligence(9). It’ll take more time for AI to catch up on these hard to copy human abilities.
So far, Augmented Humans still have an edge over Replaced Humans (or machines.)…”
And the second live stream on AWE’s main stage has been presented by Qualcomm. The company announced that their plans to bring lightweight XR Viewers to both the consumer and enterprise markets within the next year which will be realised together with 15 partners like China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, EE, KDDI, KT, LG Uplus, NTT DOCOMO, Orange, SK Telecom, SoftBank, Telefonica, Verizon and Vodafone. All of these partners have published their plans to commercialize XR Viewers to provide immersive, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) experiences over 5G networks.
Have a look at Qualcomm’s media briefing for AWE 2020 in this video:
Furthermore, 8th Wall today announced the launch of 8th Wall Face Effects, becoming the first web development platform to offer tools to develop WebAR face filters. 8th Wall Face Effects gives developers and brands complete control to create face filters that are interactive, real-time and that can instantly live on any website.
Using 8th Wall’s new tools, developers can utilize the full power and freedom of the open web to create unique face filters that work everywhere. 8th Wall Face Effects can leverage real-time APIs, support multiple users, and allow developers to choose the asset types, file sizes and content that maximizes value for their audience. In this way, face filters created with 8th Wall could use the live activity of sports data feeds to instantly change the design of a fan face paint, live stream a video as a texture to a face, connect multiple users together to create a shared shopping experience, and integrate with a developer’s preferred analytics, CRM and payment systems in a virtual try-on of products.
“8th Wall’s new Face Effects capabilities is an exciting innovation that will enable brands to entertain, engage and sell in new ways through the web without ever requiring an app download,” says Jason Yim, CEO of Trigger – The Mixed Reality Agency®. “After working with face AR in apps for 5 years, we are excited to tie directly from the user experience into commerce systems and convert engagement into transactions.”
And…
Cognitive3D launched an Objectives System, a new feature helping enterprises directly measure results from VR. The Objectives System is a human performance evaluation tool that managers can use to directly measure results from VR. With a few clicks they can define the steps required for users to be successful in the experience.
Users can also be failed automatically if they miss a crucial step. For example, if they forget to wear the hard hat or take too long to finish a task.
Further news from AWE USA 2020 will follow after today’s conferences. We will keep you updated!