Upon arrival, seeing the familiar sight of a grey and rainy airport, I had to double check my plane had not turned around and landed back in Manchester, but alas Lisbon had chosen to provide some unseasonal rainy weather to coincide with my visit to the world’s largest XR conference AWE in Lisbon (October 20-21). I needn’t have packed shorts after all.

As a published author in Augmented Reality technology and experimenter in AR & VR, I wanted to see the current state of play in the XR industry and report back to my colleagues in the Avanade Emerging Technology team.

This 2-day conference combined talks from several industry leading speakers across several tracks (Enterprise, XR Enablement, XR Impact, Developer, Retail, Ecommerce & Advertising) along with an Expo of XR devices from various supplier both small start-ups and large companies.

Keynote
The keynote delivered by AWE organiser Ori Inbar discussed a few themes that resonated with me, confirming that I was amongst my tribe of fellow XR enthusiasts.

He described how XR gives people superpowers, allowing us to experience the past, the future, travel to different places in the blink of an eye or even fly through the sky.

Superpowers aside, he talked about using XR to make our dreams a reality, limited only by our imaginations.

Ori described how XR is already a force for good, reducing travel, unnecessary production, consumption and waste and described his optimistic hope that XR can be used to help save the world by helping fight climate change and introduced AWE’s XR Prize Challenge.

Themes for the conference
I took away a few common themes from the event

• The importance of community – the crucial link between tech, industry, and business
• The rise of AI in XR - In particular, AI content generation
• XR for good – XR provides many benefits to society
• The metaverse is coming – Don’t get caught in the hype, seek expert advice

Onto the sessions!
In the first session There is no m-word.. (yet!), Industry leaders Rupert Breheny (Google), Muki Kulhan, Alina Kadlubsky set the tone for the conference discussing how there isn’t currently a Metaverse, though mentioned a few of its probable components.

It is generally accepted amongst the panel and attendees that the sudden rise in popularity of the m-word hype is due to massive FOMO (fear of missing out) – with reports of customers approaching suppliers asking, “can you build us a metaverse?” with no particular reason why or knowledge of the implications. Underlining the importance of partnering with XR suppliers who can help their customers navigate XR/Web 3.0/The Metaverse.

In a chat with Rupert after his talk, I shared my view that Simon Sinek’s Start with Why is very applicable here. We know the How (conference full of XR creators), we largely know the What (XR capabilities), what is generally overlooked is the Why. Why do customers actually need a/the metaverse to achieve their goals?

In the next session on How (and why) to close the gap between the XR Industry and the XR Community, we delved into the importance the XR community plays in realising the increasing adoption of XR in business and industry. We discussed the importance of raising awareness of the capabilities of XR using social media and the ever-increasing importance of the creator economy.

To summarise, we were left with some advice on how to grow our own personal XR brands and get increasingly involved in the XR community, as we (the community) are after all, what runs the XR capability in the XR industry.

In the session Creators in the Metaverse: All of Us, we discussed the increasing number of ways that people can create for the Metaverse, in a creative/collaborative way with the barrier to entry being continually lowered, and that a focus on authenticity must be at the heart of what we do. The panel also shared their beliefs that todays common patterns and modalities that we are used to will likely have to be unlearned to make the greatest use of new ways of interacting, creating and collaborating in the metaverse. Another common theme that soon began to evolve from the conference is the use of AI in XR and Metaverse experiences, in particular generative AI such as Stable Diffusion and Dall-E whose text to image capabilities will disrupt content creation workflows and industries.

In the session, Leap into the Industrial Metaverse, TeamViewer shared how they had taken their current logistical offering and added XR experiences to increase end-to-end efficiency for their customers.

In The Metaverse for Business: Moving Past The Hype, we were given quite a high level overview of what the Metaverse is / will be, largely an introduction to the topic, rather than going deep in any one area.

During the pandemic, XR technologies were leveraged to help meet an unprecedented urgent demand for action. In How Pfizer Leverages AR/VR In Their Manufacturing Plans Now and What They Are Exploring For the Future, we were shown just how much this pharmaceutical company uses XR technology in its daily activities and where it continues to develop their capabilities. For example, they showed how an AR app was created to guide people to the correct freezer in one of their (very large) freezer farms.

If artificial digital humans interest you then, AI Digital Humans with Deutsche Telecom and UneeQ would have been right up your street. Deutsche Telecom showed Selena, their photorealistic digital human which acted as a next generation chat bot.

In the last session of the day, Accessibility/5G in Europe, the panel discussed how we risk creating a growing digital divide if we build experiences that assume a minimum amount of connectivity, and that widespread 5G rollout should be prioritised by worldwide governments. Worryingly, with a growing cost of living, broadband is often the first amenity to be cancelled by the average family to lower costs, removing their connectivity to the online world and potentially further increasing the digital divide.

My favourite session of the conference was How to Mix Realities and Unlock Shopping Superpowers. During this talk, two XR specialists from Shopify described and demonstrated how XR experiences are at the forefront of Shopify’s mind. They demonstrated an app that leverages Apple’s recent RoomKit functionality to scan a room, before removing objects and furniture from it then allowing customers to place new furniture in there.

There were a few nice lessons to be learnt from The Top 5 Things You Need to Know about Enterprise VR Training that can be applied to not only VR training scenarios, but many other XR use cases. Including “Plan for success”, which – as odd as it sounds – is aimed at people who sometimes enter into an XR proof of concept project, which upon succeeding didn’t know the next steps to take, often not progressing further or missing opportunities.

In Meaning and Purpose: The Keys to Building the Metaverse, the panel discussed and explored what experiences will attract people to the Metaverse and what will keep people coming back citing creating storytelling experiences that illicit emotional response and engagement being crucial for success.

The panel in Reframing Identity for Mixed Reality discussed a number of important issues of identity, in particular in the Metaverse. The majority of the conversations I found to be just as applicable in todays technologies (chat rooms, Roblox etc) and not new problems. i.e. anonymity and nefarious purposes. On a positive note, one heart-warming story told was of a trans individual realising they were trans when immersed in an avatar with a gender different from their biological gender and finding it more comfortable. There was also an interesting discussion around people having multiple identities for multiple purposes. Personally, I reach towards the synonym “personas” at this point. i.e., in my opinion, we have one identity, but can have multiple personas depending on the scenario.

In another inspiring talk, Metaverse for Good – Prize Competitions to Drive the UN Sustainability Goals, We are told of a second “XR for good” competition with substantial cash prizes. The purpose of the SDG Metaverse Prize competition is not to directly solve the UN SDG’s (Sustainable Development Goals) but to use XR technologies and experiences to raise awareness of them. An extremely important endeavour with the planet running out of time without a change in general mindset and substantial intervention.

Introducing XR in the Energy Sector was a fantastic talk showcasing how XR has been used in the Energy sector for firm Elia. Elia had introduced XR within their organisation to make a number of improvements. The typical one being training, but also remote assistance, something increasingly important for offshore platforms with minimal staff.

In an fantastic example of how XR can be used for good, in How to Create “Edu-tainment” based Curriculum with VR, Not For Profit Exponential Destiny shared how it goes into lower income schools, asks which subjects are failing, builds a curriculum around it in Virtual Reality, delivers the teachings and measures the results, setting up those children to succeed in a high tech future. Amazing.

Summary
The conference was full to the brim of fantastic talks from companies and individuals that live and breathe XR. Due to multiple parallel tracks, it was physically impossible for me to attend all those that I wanted to so I shall have to watch a few more on catch up.

If you or your organisation is involved in XR, I recommend you attend future AWE events.

Here are some closing thoughts on the common themes I noticed..

The importance of community
Without a talented XR workforce, there can be no XR market. The most successful businesses will be those that partner with and invest in the XR community as well as develop XR skillsets internally including 3D modelling. The XR community are in many ways the innovators from Geoffrey Moore’s infamous book Crossing the Chasm with businesses taking a little longer to be convinced of the benefit and future of XR.

As XR practitioners, it is often up to the XR community and enthusiasts to show organisations how to leverage XR in a number of use cases successfully.

The rise of AI in XR
This area of AI content generation is evolving incredibly quickly, is set to disrupt all sorts of industries and XR is no different. Leveraging AI in XR will allow us to improve our XR experiences by adding additional realism, variety, and empathy to them. Whilst this is an exciting crossover of technologies, as with any AI use case, due diligence must be done around the ethics of AI.

XR for good
Ori’s comparison of XR capabilities to superpowers was very inspirational. Coupled with the fact that superheroes traditionally use their superpowers for good, it is easy to see how XR can be a huge force for good and help shape the future world we want our children to live in.

So powerful are XR capabilities, it was reassuring to see multiple initiatives encourage this through contests (SDG Metaverse Prize, AWE XR Prize Challenge). Imagine the collective good we could do by focussing our XR skills on the largest problems of our time.

It is important that we increasingly Do What Matters.

The metaverse is coming
There was a unilateral agreement from the various industry experts that we just don’t know what the eventual incarnation of the Metaverse will look like, we only know that there will be potentially huge opportunities and implications on future society.

Whilst the concept of the metaverse is somewhat nebulous, there are many in the XR industry and community whom I would wager are closer to understanding what it may look like than others once the dust has settled as they are intimately aware the capabilities that XR and related technologies bring to the table. I would strongly encourage you to listen to technical talent and experts more than “thought leaders” and influencers selling virtual snake oil.

If your organisation desires to be an early adopter in Metaverse, I’d strongly suggest that it be clear on its Why. Without understanding the why, there is little point in defining the what or investing in the how of moving towards the Metaverse. As with anything, Start with Why (Simon Sinek).

I am excited and optimistic for the future. I hope you are too.

Learn more about Avanade’s augmented reality and virtual reality technologies here.