AWE 2024: All the AR, VR and Haptic Experiences at Augmented World Expo

Your CNET experts have interviewed their last source and seen their last demo, so we're signing off of this blog — but we'll keep writing through the week to bring you our thoughts and reflections on the big AR/VR products coming soon. 

Make sure to watch our quick coverage on TikTok and longer videos on YouTube. And for everything else, see you on CNET.com!

I wonder when I'll be wearing everyday glasses that have AR displays built in. I saw some demos that started to feel like it's not impossible anymore. Lumus' reflective waveguide technology, which I'd never seen before, was big and vivid combined with prescription lenses aimed at making future smartglasses not feel weird. Avegant, another company I've followed for years, showed me another pair of prototype wireless glasses small enough to embed a light projector in the arms that was bright enough to see against a bright daylight-filled window.

Lumus and Avegant make components for glasses, and the question remains which other manufacturers will make the leap to evolve their glasses into new forms: Meta, Xreal, or some other company like Samsung, Google or Lenovo? The biggest obstacle to AR glasses might not be the hardware parts like displays and lenses: It's likely the phones and other software that will need to work seamlessly with them.

Got an intricate 3D model you want to work on with your colleague? Campfire's cross-platform software lets you work on something like a 3D CAD file together with multiple people, showing what everyone is working on and what they're pointing at, to reduce confusion when collaborating on a complex project.

Campfire's software lets co-workers join in on multiple platforms. On the AWE 2024 show floor, I saw the company's employees demonstrate working on the same file, with one person wearing a Meta Quest 3 VR headset and the other using an iMac to edit the same 3D model — each participant had a brightly colored line shooting from their name to show which part of the model they were fiddling with. I could imagine how much easier this makes talking about complex 3D figures, when you can just point to what you're discussing.

Jay Wright, CEO of Campfire, pointed out to me that this isn't just helpful for industrial designers — it could be suitable for salespeople demonstrating products and educators teaching with 3D models. Campfire works with Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3 and now Apple Vision Pro.

Earlier this week ahead of AWE 2024, CNET got an early look at the newest version of HaptX's VR gloves for simulating touch while immersed in VR. We all got a turn with the setup — actually gloves linked to an air-blowing backpack and digitally connected to a VR headset. The HaptX Gloves G1, as this latest model is called, has dozens of tiny pressure zones lined against each of the wearer's fingers that let them "feel" objects they reach out to touch in VR. 

The gloves use what the company calls microfluidic channels — essentially extremely small tubes going from the backpack to the wearer's fingers — to pump air into each individual pressure zone, which might push back against your finger a lot or a little depending on how rigid the simulated object is. For instance, I put on the gloves and brushed some plant leaves that gave way under my fingers, but brushing a rusted anchor felt firm. 

It's not just the pressure but the precision that matters. The inside of each glove has 135 pressure zones, most cupping fingers and the palm of the hand where the skin is most sensitive. In the demo, I picked up a spiked anemone and "felt" the firmness of each spike and the scattered distribution of all the spikes across my palm. I rubbed my hand across the rusted anchor and felt varying bumps of oxidized lumps across the simulation of old metal. 

The whole backpack setup is reasonably light — at least for my hefty 5-foot, 8-inch frame and experience shouldering stuffed backpacks through long hikes. It wouldn't wear too much during extensive sessions, I'd imagine, though I wore the backpack, gloves and VR headset for only about 20 minutes. The setup is meant for long sessions, as HaptX has been developing its Gloves G1 to sell to enterprise clients in the industrial, medical and defense industries. 

Look for our deeper dive on HaptX Gloves G1 coming soon!

An art installation at this year's AWE show using VR and haptic vibrations told a story that was incredibly moving: I Will Defy You Until My Dying Breath, a piece by Cameron Kostopoulos that tells the story of a survivor of attempted electroshock gender conversion therapy. The documentary experience is told along with vibrations delivered by haptic wearables on my chest, arms and hands made by BHaptics. The narrative is heartbreaking, the strength of the narrator uplifting. And it made me cry afterwards, as if I'd somehow felt a tiny slice of the emotions in the story. 

There are plenty of haptic glove and wearable companies at AWE: HaptX, Senseglove, BHaptics and others. But most demos of these technologies talk about gaming or training. I Will Defy You was an emotional haptic journey, and one that didn't hit me until a few moments before the end, and persisted well afterwards.  

But it reminded me that haptics technology, which isn't as fully here yet for AR and VR as it could be in the future, has untapped possibilities. It's an unknown, and part of an expanding sensory zone for immersive art.

Qualcomm's booth is one of the first things you see when you walk onto the AWE 2024 show floor, with half a dozen demos of AR glasses and headsets that use the company's chips. One of the demos is put on by QONOQ Devices for its newly debuted AR glasses, which the company says are the first XR (extended reality) glasses to be powered by the Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1 chip introduced in late 2022. 

The QONOQ glasses, which are still in development and don't yet have an official name, are lightweight standalone glasses with noticeably thick plastic frames that are pretty light, at around 125 grams. They have six degrees of freedom and each lens' AR display reaches approximately 1,000 nits of brightness. As directed by a QONOQ representative at the demo, I put on the glasses and looked around, finding a digital triceratops skeleton lying on the ground, with a conspicuously missing bone. 

As expected with AR, the skeleton image was superimposed on the rectangular screen area within the lenses, which was small enough that I had to physically turn my head searching for the missing bone I was told to look for. But once I found it, I reached out with my fingers and — without gloves or controllers — pinched my fingers to pick up the bone, then moved to drop it in place. The digital triceratops, now complete, hopped up and did a jig. Delightful and impressive to have the lightweight glasses recognize my finger gesture.

We're back at the Long Beach Convention Center for the third and final day of AWE 2024. Here at the entrance, greeting every attendee, are stars on the ground listing inductees to the AWE's new Hall of Fame. These honor the historic contributions of innovators, designers and storytellers who brought augmented and virtual reality to life, including "the grandfather of VR," Tom Furness; NASA Illusion Transmitter inventor Valerie Thomas; and famed science fiction author Neal Stephenson.

Though Sony showed off its new VR headset at CES 2024, we got to see it again and get hands-on time at AWE 2024. The SRH-S1, as it's called, was developed by Sony with tech company Siemens, and it uses the latter's XR software and is powered by a Snapdragon XR2 Plus Gen 2 chipset. It's a lightweight headset that doesn't completely wrap around your face, leaving some room on the sides to see the world outside — something that seems helpful when you're working over long periods.

The SRH-S1 has a unique control interface. In place of the symmetrical hand-held VR controllers other headsets use, Sony's device has one that rests under one hand's pointer finger and another ring-shaped one that wraps around your other hand's pointer finger. In the demo provided, we were placed in a virtual film set and used the pointer controller to move a camera (modeled after a real-life movie/TV camera) to record actors. We could also use the pointer controller to precisely angle the camera and toggle settings like depth of focus.

Sony and Siemens have pitched the SRH-S1 as suited for creators, especially those in industrial design and product engineering. Given our demo experience — both CNET How To reporter Nelson Aguilar (pictured) and I tried it out — we could see how the unique pointer controller enabled more precision than typical VR controllers, while the headset was light enough that it could seemingly be worn for hours.

On stage in the large Grand Ballroom of the Long Beach Convention Center, VR pioneer Palmer Luckey, who created the Oculus Rift headset, chatted with Darshan Shankar, CEO of Bigscreen, a maker of small-format VR headsets. The conversation was led by academic Stephanie Riggs, a creator of immersive narratives. 

The chat was mostly casual, with Luckey recounting the origins of Oculus and showing off an Oculus Rift DK1, one of the first VR headsets for consumers, which was released in 2013. Luckey noted that Oculus shipped 55,000 of these units (including around a thousand still on pallets in his storage unit), a critical number that was important for the company to hit: even if Oculus failed thereafter, it would still have shipped the most VR headsets (the previous record holder sold 50,000). 

Luckey compared the DK1 to Shankar's Bigscreen device, which is more like glasses than a full-on headset. At 127 grams the Bigscreen weighs a third of what the Rift DK1 does, with over four times the display resolution — significant progress over the decade that separates both products.

At the Sightful booth before the show floor opened today, the whole CNET ground team sat down to get our hands on the company's new flagship product: a laptop that ditches the display in favor of AR glasses. In this case, Sightful is using a customized version of Nreal AR glasses plugged in to a laptop body with a Qualcomm chip running Android.

The upside of this setup, called the Spacetop, is that it's portable, familiar and intuitive. Since the glasses plug into and run power from the laptop, they're pretty light — I could see myself using and wearing them for hours. The field of view isn't huge, but it's easy to look around to find the multiple browser windows you've set up... and the digital canvas for all your windows is vast, simulating an over 100-inch TV. Or in Chrome terms, I was able to fit six-and-a-half browser windows horizontally and just over four windows vertically in its ample digital space.

The Spacetop is intended to help you work on documents, spreadsheets and whatever else (Office 365, Slack, Figma, ChatGPT, and so on) you can do in a browser or Android interface through a native app. Spacetop isn't intended to be a gaming rig — so if you're a hardcore gamer looking for high-end graphics, this isn't the right machine (yet), though the platform is suitable for cloud gaming. The Qualcomm Snapdragon QC S8550 chip powering it, which is intended for Internet of Things applications, can't push pixels like a high-end GPU can — but if that's something users want, the company may look into it, Sightful's Ladd Martin told me. And in my demo, it was perfectly suitable for running a dozen browser windows at once.

The Spacetop has an eight-hour battery life, costs $1,900 and will be available this fall. And oh yeah — it fits pretty well in your lap while you're in your airplane seat (which Sightful had set up to simulate the most challenging situation for getting work done).

Augmented reality company Xreal unveiled a device intended to ease adoption of AR glasses. The company's $199 Beam Pro isn't a phone, but it has the same shape and works as an Android-powered handheld controller and AR enabler for Xreal's line of plug-in display-enabled glasses — more news CNET's Scott Stein broke after getting to see it ahead of the conference.

The Xreal Beam Pro can be ordered now and will ship sometime in August, and Stein had plenty more thoughts about how the pseudo-phone with spatial cameras can change how folks use AR glasses. You can check out his comments below:

Read more: Xreal's Beam Pro Looks Like the Future of Phones That Power AR Glasses

During its keynote presentation at Day 1 of AWE 2024, social media company Snap announced that its Snapchat platform will start using generative AI to make AR images on demand. CNET's Scott Stein got the details ahead of time, writing that the company will use gen AI to make images for users on demand as well as integrate gen AI into developer tools to help speed the creation of new AR experiences.

In short, this might be the advent of the AI and AR era, Stein wrote. 

Read more: Real-Time Generative AI Is Coming to Snap's Phone AR Effects

Just inside the AWE 2024 show floor doors are some of the most familiar brands in AR and VR: Meta and Magic Leap, whose demos we checked out on Day 1. Next to them on the right is Spacetop, which is showing off its "AR laptop for work," which swaps AR glasses for a laptop display and is coming in the fall. Just out of frame to the right is Qualcomm, which is touting a lineup of AR/VR glasses and experiences powered by its chips.

The first day of AWE 2024 was a blitz of appointments and roaming the show floor to meet with exhibitors and see a bunch of new tech. We're posting some of our early hands-on reports to CNET's Instagram channel, but we'll have static photos and sneak peeks here. Here's what greets attendees just inside the Long Beach Convention Center, with meeting rooms upstairs to the left, the grand ballroom for keynote events upstairs to the right... and today on the second day of AWE 2024, we're headed straight ahead down the escalators to the show floor itself.

One of the rare occasions on AWE 2024 Day 1 when the whole CNET crew was gathered: Nelson Aguilar, a How To reporter; Jesse Orrall, a senior video producer; Scott Stein, an editor at large; Theodore Liggians, a marketing manager; and David Lumb, a reporter for Mobile. 

Let's get this show on the road! AWE has moved from Santa Clara in Northern California to Long Beach down south. It's a typical beautiful sunny day, but everyone's inside to see the latest next-generation immersive tech. Big tech corporations and small startups have set up shop on the show floor of the Long Beach Convention Center.