The Coolest Tech From Augmented World Expo!

Foreign. Than some of my past videos. I just got back from the Augmented World Expo out in Santa Clara, California and this was the first live event that I've gone to in probably four years. And, well, it was definitely interesting. This was the first event that I went to since I've had had a popular YouTube channel. And yeah, it was definitely different.

So today is day two of the Augmented World Expo here in my hotel room, getting ready to head down. Today's the day we get to play in the playground. Playground is essentially where they show off all the cool VR, Arkansas toys and let some of us play with them and experience them and use them ourselves.

And been real interesting.

This is the first event I've been to since I've had a popular YouTube channel. So it's a very weird feeling to kind of get noticed, but it's been really, really awesome being somebody who's totally an introvert myself. Wandering around a convention center hall and having people want to take pictures with me and stuff like that has been.

A completely new experience for me.

But it's been fun. And if you are at one of.

These events and you see me hiding.

Out one of the conferences, feel free to come up and say, hi, I am an introvert. I don't normally go in start conversations, but if you come up and say hi to me, I' usually keep the conversation going.

So in this video, I want to break down a little bit about my experience and talk about some of the cool tech that's coming in the world of augmented reality. I've really been procrastinating on this video because although my brand is Matt Wolfe and Future Tools, and it's not specifically the AI channel, people have come to know my channel to be all about AI. And so whenever I make a video that sort of strays from that AI narrative, I always start to wonder if people are going to enjoy these videos. But really, I aspire to like a tech YouTuber. I like to talk about cool tech. AI is something that I'm extremely passionate about and I love talking about it, but I also just love all tech in general. I'm finding myself increasingly drawn to extended reality Right now. We're witnessing this convergence emerging of realms where AI is actually starting to shape our virtual experience in new ways. If you're like me and you see the future painted in hues of mixed reality, awe is the place to be. It's where technology transcends the bounds of our imagination, giving us a glimpse into the future where our digital world and our physical world intertwine seamlessly. Over the last few days, I've had my mind completely blown by what is possible. I tried all new experiences that I didn't even think were possible a few years ago. And in this video, I want to break down just a handful of the really cool technology that I got to experience that I think has the potential to change the way we watch movies, play video games, and experience the digital universe. Now, when I arrived at the event, I was given a media pass. It was distinct from all the other passes because it had a green lanyard on it instead of any other color. And the beauty of having this green lanyard on my pass was that I pretty much got the VIP treatment everywhere I went. I actually almost felt bad because when I went to go test new tech, a lot of times they would pull me to the front of the line in front of other people that were waiting to use it. In one instance, a tool had a queue that was booked throughout the entire rest of the day, and they squeezed me in in front of the next person in line. While I don't think I forced anybody to miss out on the opportunity to test this tech, I did feel a little awk throughout the event that because I was wearing this press pass, they kept on pulling me to the front of the line and letting me test things in front of people that had been waiting in line for a while. So if you're one of those people that saw me cut in line, I really apologize. I felt really awkward doing it. And it was usually the company that was demoing the product that was grabbing me and pulling me to the front of the line. It wasn't by my choice. Now I wandered the expo floor, and I literally looked at every single booth in the entire place. I made sure to capture at least a little bit of footage of every single booth so that no matter what, even if I missed a booth or didn't spend enough time, I could come back and review my footage and see some of the stuff that I had missed. But in particular, there was nine things throughout this event that I kind of want to spotlight that I found really, really impressive. This was the stuff that blew me away the most while using it. Now, I'm sure there's a lot of other people that are watching this that were at awe, that were like, I can't believe you didn't include this in your list. There was things I missed, so there's definitely a few things that I didn't actually get the demo of because either it was too crowded when I went, or I Just ran out of time to test it out. So the first thing that I came across that I thought was really cool was a product called Sightful. And Sightful is this keyboard and mouse combination, but it doesn't have a monitor. Instead of a monitor, you put on these glasses that are made by xreal, a company that used to be called Nreal. And you see the monitors in 360 degrees around you. So you can work completely privately. Imagine being on a train or a plane. You just have a keyboard sitting down in front of you. Or with no monitor, you put on these glasses and now you're immersed in monitors all around you, 360 degree field of vision. You can put monitors up above you, down below you, you can move these monitors all around. I got to demo this and play around with it. It was really, really impressive. Now, the one downside about this one is that right now it's built on Android. So I couldn't do things that are super GPU intensive. Things like video editing or generating images with AI in the computer itself, because again, it's an Android operating system. But it's amazing for YouTube, for writing emails, for writing documents, for messaging people on Slack or various other messaging platforms. And you can do it in complete privacy because only you see what's on the computer screen, because the computer screen is within the glasses. Now, the next thing that I demoed that I really, really enjoyed were these xreal Air glasses. They look just kind of like standard aviator glasses. Honestly, they look like glasses that I would wear out in the daytime anyway. But when you move your face close to them and you look inside of them, you can watch movies, you can play video games. You pretty much hook up anything that you would hook a monitor up to. So if you wanted to play Xbox on it, or Nintendo Switch or PlayStation on it, you could. If you wanted to hook your computer up to it, you could. If you want to sit around and watch YouTube inside of the glasses, you could do that as well. And as far as augmented reality goes, these glasses are under 400 bucks, which in this world is actually a barely inexpensive price point for augmented reality glasses. Now, they are wired. You do have to hook up a cord to them. And if you want to hook it up to a system like a PlayStation or an Xbox or Nintendo Switch, you do need a special adapter to hook up to those. But out of the box, you can do things like watch movies on it or watch YouTube videos, or hook it up to a smartphone. I really like the form factor of these. Now, they had them on this little stand. So I couldn't actually try them on myself. I was only able to kind of lean up and look through them. But honestly, I could see myself getting a pair of these, just if nothing else, to kick back and watch movies on and have it feel like I'm watching it on a hundred foot TV or a giant movie theater. I played around with these glasses from a company called Ant Reality. They had prototypes on hand where they could switch between augmented reality and virtual reality with just the press of a button. Before you press the button, you see the augmented reality of everything superimposed on the world around you. You press the button and it darkens the background. So now, instead of superposing it on the world around you, it's just a black background, and now you're immersed in it. Next up, I tried the digi lens glasses. These were augmented reality glasses that you were able to use your fingers to pinch and zoom and manipulate things. It almost had a bit of a Minority Report feel to it. The demo they showed me was a demo of a car engine. And I was able to spin the car image around by spinning my hand around. I was able to pinch and drag to open up the car engine and look at spots inside of the car engine, and it was pretty impressive as it just floated in front of me. Now, the one major downside to these was they were a lot heavier than I imagined. As I was wearing them, they kept on, like, sliding down my nose, and I kept on pushing them back. But they do have, like, a head strap and a band that you could put on to sort of help them stay on your head. It was just the demo model that I was playing with kept on kind of sliding down on me, which kind of made the experience a little less than optimal, but it was still really cool. This was the first time that I was experiencing augmented reality in combination with just using hand gestures, having no remotes in my hand, just kind of moving my hands around to manipulate what I was seeing. The next thing I played around with was this haptics device. You basically strap a big old backpack on yourself. They slide you into these gloves, and then when you touch stuff, you actually feel the sensation on your hand as you touch whatever you're touching. In the demo that I was doing, I turned on a sink. You literally put your hand out. You could feel the handle of the sink, and you pull the handle to turn the sink on. You could put your hand under the running water, and it has this weird sensation like water is actually hitting your hand. And then I turned off the water and then I tried to pick up a tea kettle. And you can kind of feel the tea kettle. It's a very weird sensation. You can tell that you're touching something. Like the haptics give you that feedback of when you gras. You can feel that you're grasping it. But the weird thing about it is without the weight of the thing that you're grabbing, it's just a completely different sensation. So, for example, I went and picked up a tea kettle, and you can feel that you're touching something with your fingers. Your fingers feel that sensation that you're touching the handle of the tea kettle. But when you lift the tea kettle, it's effortless. There's zero weight underneath it. So it feels like you're holding a handle. But the thing that you're lifting is lighter than a balloon or lighter than a feather. And it's just this really weird sensation of you're seeing the tea kettle and you're feeling the tea kettle touching your hands and then you lift it and there is zero resistance, zero weight to the thing that you're lifting. And that is just a hard to describe, odd experience, but very, very cool. I did talk to one of the founders of this company and they said this was just an early prototype. Right now, they're just exploring what's possible. I don't necessarily know if they see this as something that home consumers are going to have across the country. This is just a very, very early prototype where they're trying to see what they can do with this technology. Another really cool piece of tech that I saw there that is so hard to describe without seeing it in person, is the Luma Pad. Now, the Luma Pad, it looks like a Android tablet. It functions like an Android tablet. It actually does what an Android tablet would do. You can download any of the normal apps you download on an Android tablet, but the tablet is in 3D. And when you look at it, you can see the depth to things. You can actually open up an object viewer and see 3D objects that were made in like a tool, like blender, and you could spin them around. And as you're looking at the tablet, it looks like it is popping off the tablet. You don't wear any 3D glasses. There is nothing that goes over your eyes. You are just staring at this tablet and it looks like the thing that is on the tablet is popping out of the tablet in 3D. I tried to film videos to show off this technology and you can't capture it in 2D. You cannot capture it on video. No matter how much I tried, I could not get a visual representation on my camera of what the 3D looked like in real life. This is one of those things where you literally need to play around with it yourself and see it in person. To see the 3D and to see it popping off of the screen, it actually really blew me away. This was something that I never thought I'd see, something like this without needing 3D glasses. Another really interesting one was this aroma join. Now, obviously, you can't see it on video, but this is one where you actually smell what you're seeing on the camera. There's a little unit that sits on top of the screen that has cartridges in it, and it can blend various types of smells. So what you're seeing on the screen, you might see chocolate and get the scent of chocolate. You may see a race car driving by and get the scent of race gas. You might be walking through an orchard and get the smell of oranges. It could take various scents that were these cartridges and blend them to create new scents. And that was just a handful of the crazy experiences that I got to test there. I did a VR headset where I went underneath the ocean and was able to interact with bubbles and jellyfish and sea life. And the demo ended with me getting eaten by a whale and inside the body of a whale. I also played laser tag in augmented reality, where they had a whole bunch of boxes setup, but when you put on the augmented reality glasses, the boxes transformed into whatever environment you were playing laser tag in. That was a really fun experience. And quite honestly, of all the virtual reality experiences that I've played with. I hate to say it because there's so much new tech rolling out, but the Meta Quest was probably the most immersive of all of the tools that I tried. I got to play around with the Meta Quest Pro. There is a new meta quest 3 that's coming out, but I believe the Meta Quest Pro actually still has higher specs than the Meta Quest 3. So the visuals were very immersive, and I was actually really, really blown away. I'd never played with a Meta Quest Pro before, and it was by far the most immersive experience that I got at Augmented World Expo. Out of all the various virtual reality and augmented reality and all the things that I tried, the Meta Quest still blew my mind more than anything else. The little demo they gave you started in augmented reality, where you can see everything around you, and then throughout the gameplay, you paint walls, and then the walls make everything outside of the world disappear, and the next thing you know, you're inside of a virtual reality world and you can no longer see what's going on around you. And it just blends between virtual reality and augmented reality so seamlessly that it just blew my mind. And again, this is just a handful of experiences that I got to try myself. There were so many other things that were on demonstration here that either I didn't get to test or I did test, but maybe I didn't record myself testing it. And if I talked about everything I experience experienced at this event, this video would probably be three plus hours long. So my time at AWE was just a roller coaster of tech exploration. At times I was awestruck and intrigued, and at other times I was sort of wanting more from the technology. The promise of AI and extended reality is so close, but it was so clear that we're still a few steps away. We're not quite at that ready player. One moment. Maybe with the new Apple headset that was just unveiled, but at $3,500 a unit, I still don't think that's the thing that's going to get mainstream adoption yet. While the devices were revolutionary and the demos were super impressive, I couldn't help but notice there's still a bit of a missing link. And that missing link is the transition from being cool tech to being an indispensable part of everybody's daily reality. With that being said, every innovation starts somewhere. I left AWE both inspired and hopeful. The journey towards realizing our sci fi dreams of virtual reality worlds and metaverses, it's getting there, it's underway. And as AI and extended reality start to merge, we're going to see the pace at which this stuff advances really speed up. It's getting easier and easier for developers to create new worlds, create new characters, create new avatars, create realistic NPCs that have their own voice and personality. It's getting easier to create immersive worlds with AI and AI art. And as we all wait for this tech to catch up to our vision, we need to stop and appreciate the progress that's been made so far. All of these tech advancements in AI and virtual reality and augmented reality and mixed reality is sparking so much creativity in people, in developers, in tech nerds like me and you who watch these videos. The future is shaping up to be super exciting and I can't wait to continue to take you along for the ride. Again, I know this video was different than normal. Hopefully you enjoyed it. I'm trying to experiment with different styles and different types of videos. But don't worry, I'm going to keep on giving you those news breakdowns of AI, those tutorials and breakdowns of cool tools that are coming. But every once in a while, I gotta mix it up and try something new. So hopefully you enjoyed this video. I'll see you guys in the next one.

Bye. Bye.