As the California sun sets on AWE for another year, we wanted to share our highlights from the event. What we love about AWE is the chance to connect with other leaders in our industry as well as the people who love XR as much as we do, and this year was no exception.
Alongside some awesome AWE networking we had everything from the good, the bad and the ugly of WebXR to important conversations around accessibility and an exciting AWE honour.
Completing our ecosystem with WebXR support
The team loved watching people get hands on with Zapbox and Mattercraft demonstrating our new WebXR support. Together with WebXR support, Zapbox and Mattercraft now make up a complete ecosystem for content development, publishing and deployment on Zapbox, Quest, Pico, Magic Leap and Apple Vision Pro - presenting an awesome opportunity for developers and designers to bring their creations to life.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of WebXR
This year our CTO Connell Gauld took to the main stage to discuss the opportunities and challenges of building for WebXR and how developers can capitalise on this paradigm shift from 2D to 3D immersive content on the web. Connell demonstrated how with Mattercraft you can quickly and easily create and deploy stand-out 3D web content across desktops, smartphones and headsets (Apple Vision Pro, Quest 3, Magic Leap 2, Pico and our very own Zapbox thanks to new WebXR support).
Making the world more accessible with XR
Our CEO Caspar also joined Charlie Fink, Michael Freeman (Ocutrx Technologies) and Soobin Ha (Benvision) to chat about Zapvision and Accessible QR codes and the journey we’ve been on with assistive technology. They covered some of the opportunities and challenges faced in developing assistive technologies for people with sight loss and how solutions like Accessible QR codes, Benvision and OcuLenz are levelling the playing field and positively impacting the daily lives of blind and partially sighted people.
We’ve been delighted this year to see more and more conferences and events like CES, NRF and SXSW shine a light on the importance of accessibility and loved the opportunity to talk about it at AWE this year.
A star in AWE’s XR Hall of Fame
We were thrilled to have our CEO Caspar inducted into the AWE XR Hall of Fame alongside many of the trailblazers and visionaries who have shaped the extended reality landscape.
“To be honest, this recognition really isn't about me at all. I just happen to get the best job in the world of being the frontman as CEO for the entire Zappar team alongside our partners and community who continue to innovate and push the boundaries of XR and have allowed us to build and share our platform, solutions and experiences over the past 13 years as a business.”
Caspar Thykier
And with that we want to say a huge thank you to everyone who came by to see the team and to everyone who makes AWE possible - we’re already looking forward to next year!
Grace VassalloSenior Brand & Marketing Manager, Zappar