Attending and exhibiting at Augmented World Expo (AWE) 2021 was a risk. We’ve all been craving an opportunity to see actual people in person again for a long time, and AWE has always been a wonderful time to connect with old friends and make new ones. Our industry explores new horizons, and that makes our community strong and tight. It’s a partnership and a friendship, and that was on display last week. Thankfully, the people behind AWE did an amazing job putting together a safe and amazing show, and we’re glad that we went through with our plans to attend. (We even made a video of our team trip to Santa Clara.)

During the show, we announced the latest updates to HoloSuite (that includes an integration with Depthkit Studio), and we also had a pair of fun HoloSuite demos playing in the booth. The first showed playback of volumetric video by highlighting Tilt 5’s addictive AR board game. 

The Tilt 5 team was across the aisle from us, and we worked together to pass on information about both of our companies. It was a great collaboration and we look forward to more of that in the future.

The second demo used an Ultraleap device to manipulate volumetric video on a Looking Glass display. It drew a lot of visitors. The demo offered them the opportunity to zoom in/out of volumetric clips, change their POV of the video they were watching, and swipe to move on to the next video.  

These demos were attention-grabbing features that we will continue to evolve, and the Arcturus booth was very busy both days. 

We also handed out dozens of fun trading cards with QR codes, for visitors to learn more about HoloEdit’s workflows. Geppei, the pug, probably attracted the most attention though, and I encourage you to check him out (as well as a few of our other featured workflows). 

Because volumetric video is our specific focus at Arcturus, AWE is a great touchpoint within the XR community. It helps us gauge how the overall industry is evolving and progressing. There are several established companies in this space, but volumetric is still young and growing.  New players are constantly entering the market, and AWE is where we have a chance to connect in person. It’s also a place to learn what else is available, and how partnerships might be struck that benefit everyone.

Another point of interest is volumetric video use cases. They are still fairly sparse, but they always stand out. Everyone has heard or seen the Coldplay/BTS music video, the Balenciaga fashion show or the Pose with the Pros NFL campaign, but fewer have seen the volumetric training videos, the Samsung BTS phone activation -- or most recently -- the volumetric PSA’s for vaccination. 

We have a lot of work to do in our industry to put a spotlight on all the use cases for volumetric video. Projects we’ve all completed for ad agencies, consumer brands, sports teams, musicians -- even ecommerce applications like the one we did for the fashion brand Anayi -- must have a bright light shined on them to help educate the world-at-large, and show them how they too can, and should, be using volumetric video.   

AWE 2021 was a wonderful conference, well worth our time and investment. We look forward to seeing you there in 2022.