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#1590: AWE Past & Present Series: Ori Inbar on the Founding of Augmented World Expo to Cultivate the XR Community

August 2, 2025by kentbye

Here’s my interview with Ori Inbar, co-founder at Super Ventures and Augmented World Expo, that was conducted on Friday, June 2, 2023 at Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.

This AWE Past and Present series represents 41 interviews and 24.5 hours of coverage from AWE 2025 as well as past enterprise XR conferences gatherings from 2018-2025 and should hopefully give a good overview of some of the current trends and discussions happening within the industry.

This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.

Music: Fatality

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Rough Transcript

[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of special computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com. So I'm going to be diving into a 40-episode AWE past and present series that is covering all the interviews that I did at Augmented World Expo this past June, but also going back into my archive and doing some unpublished interviews that I've done over the years at Augmented World Expo. But also some people that I've interviewed at AWE that I've also got other interviews with them that I did at other festivals. So generally how I start to think about this is that there's the enterprise market and then from the enterprise market, a lot of the things that are happening there are going to eventually get into the consumer market. you end up getting a little bit of a sneak peek of what things are to come when you go to a place like Augmented World Expo. And so there's kind of a magic of going back in time and then seeing previous interviews. Like I've got an interview with Tom Emmerich back at VRTO in 2018, and he's an augmented reality futurist. He's talking about all the things that he's seeing, like the future of this technology. And now fast forward to 2025, and just interesting to see some of those things and ideas that are starting to really come to pass in terms of the technology that's out there today. so augmented world expo 2023 was just a few days before the apple vision pro was announced on that monday of june 5th 2023 and so this was happening that previous wednesday thursday and friday so i'll be starting off with an interview that i did with or in bar where he gives a little bit of the origin story of augmented world expo and starting as an ar entrepreneur and then wanting to have the community come together and that's a lot of what augmented world expo has been is the community of XR developers. It's, you know, because it's augmented world expo, it's been highly focused on augmented reality, but virtual reality has certainly been a part of it as well. And you kind of have the XR community that is coming together to both have a bunch of talks, like over 400 speakers and lots of talks that are published on their YouTube channel soon after the festival. And then also the expo floor where you have all these demos and It's really like the top gathering of the community coming together and discussing where the industry is at and where it's going. And so my strategy for going to Augmented World Expo is to cover the people that I know and to kind of rely upon this idea of serendipitous collisions where I'm colliding at the right moment and the right time and trying to see what is happening from their perspective within the context of the industry. Yeah. Hopefully, as I do this 40 episode series, it will give you a bit of a sense of what's happening in this moment in time, but also what has been happening for a number of years. And those visions and aspirations maybe starting to take root now as we start to see like smart glasses and augmented reality and technology. with Apple now in the game and potentially doing their glasses sometime in the future. You got Meta that's there, and then Snap has also got their Snap Spectacles. Also, XREAL has their kind of birdbath approach, but they're also kind of moving out beyond that. So I'll be digging into lots of different perspectives, what's happening in the XR industry, and hopefully just take an archetypal snapshot of where we're at now and where we're going here in the future. So we're becoming all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Ori happened on Friday, June 2nd, 2023 at the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.

[00:03:29.122] Ori Inbar: I'm Ori Anwar. I've been an addict of AR and VR for the last 15 years. I started as an AR entrepreneur and decided that there's so few of us and we need to work together to help advance this industry that also started the AWE community in 2010 as a tiny little conference and it became what it is today which is this massive community of AR and VR entrepreneurs that meet in large events, US, Europe, Asia, and also in meetups in now 35 cities around the world. And I feel like, you know, this year we're feeling like we're actually starting to move the needle and this industry is moving forward.

[00:04:12.846] Kent Bye: Great, and maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space.

[00:04:18.419] Ori Inbar: My background, I mean, I've been a fan of VR since the early 90s, but it felt like it's not ready for us to jump into it. So, you know, I've been working in internet companies, enterprise internet companies, a few startups until, you know, one of them was acquired by SAP. So I spent a few years there leading their internet platform. And then in 2007, decided to leave. And that's when I discovered augmented reality for the first time. I wasn't aware it exists, but I felt like it's, you know, when I came home and realized my kids are always in front of a screen playing video games or even on the Internet. And I felt like we cannot prevent them from doing this. But maybe you can find a way to bring them closer to reality, to engage with the real world, kind of like I grew up as a kid. And that's when I discovered augmented reality, which is exactly made for that purpose. And discovering, you know, there's very few people around the world that work on that at that time, 2007. But there are a few really interesting labs that were developing cool stuff. Went to eSmart. eSmart is probably the number one academic event for AR and met with everybody, started blogging about it. They got excited. We got excited. We felt like we need to create an industry around it. And that's how everything started.

[00:05:42.881] Kent Bye: Well, we're here in 2023, and you announced on stage at the beginning, by the way, you always have a really amazing opening keynote exploring the current trends and dynamics, and so with holograms and ChatDBT and AI, but you had also said that this is the 14th year of AWE, and so you've had 30-plus events over those number of years, and we're at the cusp of having, as soon as next week, next Monday, we have Apple potentially entering into the chat, metaphorically, having whatever is going to be announced. And so I'd love to hear some of your thoughts of this journey for the last 14 years. And if you feel like we're a bit, you know, I've been a number of years and this year it feels like with the pandemic, it slowed down a lot. I was here in 2019. There was very thriving and then pandemic came along and then 2022 was coming back a little bit. But now with 2023, there's like a huge amount of folks that are here and a lot of excitement, and with a potential new major player with Apple. So I'd love to hear some of your thoughts and reflection of this particular moment in time of this history and evolution.

[00:06:41.277] Ori Inbar: Yeah, it definitely feels like we're back in a big way. And when I say we're back, it's the industry. And the thing is, and I kind of talked about it in the opening, it's not like we went anywhere. Yes, there were some ups and downs in the mood or different things that affected it. But if you look at the revenue growth, overall revenue growth of this industry, it's been pretty consistent over the last 14 years. you know, growing from just, you know, a few million dollar revenue to $38 billion revenue today. So I feel like, you know, if you look back at that history, it feels like, you know, we've come a long way. I mean, I can go through a bunch of ups and downs through that time. When Google Glass came out, it was huge hype around AR, but then also a huge drop because of, you know, the whole glass hole effect. But then, you know, a couple of years later, you had Snapchat and Pokemon Go with, you know, huge success. And HoloLens came out and there was a lot of hope. It didn't turn out to be, you know, relevant for the mainstream at that time. So again, small dip. So, you know, lots of ups and downs. But overall, I think If you look at this community here, this year 5,000 people, a lot of them have been at it for over a decade, working very passionately and with a lot of perseverance, because they just believe in this new way to interact with the world. and with information and now it's starting to show, to bear fruit, you know, it's starting to work. And, you know, the big players have been in it for many years actually, you know, Apple has been in it for over seven, eight years, you know, in terms of software, developing all the platform, building the developer community, the different sensors and the smartphones that we have in our pockets. So now it's a much easier jump for them to go into a headset. And no doubt this is the most anticipated event in XR in many years. And I think no matter what happens with it, whether it sells like the Apple Watch, or other products that kind of took some time until they took off, it already has an impact on the overall mood in the community. It's interesting, you know, we've seen a lot of critical articles in the media, in the mainstream media in the last few months and then this week and even last week all of a sudden you see a kind of a transformation towards a much more positive approach and i feel like you know they're looking at apple and seeing you know if apple is jumping into it it must be something important that you have to look into it so that's having its effect And then, like I said in the opening, you have Samsung and Google. And again, Google has been in it for over a decade in different ways. But now they feel like it's the moment. They cannot hold on anymore. They have to move ahead fast. and it's going to be a race to the top and also bring a lot of the small startups, the creators, the developers, lift everybody. So I think it's going to have a huge positive impact on the industry.

[00:09:53.809] Kent Bye: Yeah, having, covering the XR industry for a number of years and coming to see events like this where there's 5,000 people with 130 plus startups and exhibitors and I see articles about the metaverse being dead, you know, let's have a eulogy for this failed effort and yet We have these companies like Qualcomm who are like building foundations. We have the Metaverse Standards Forum to be able to come up with the foundational technologies. So it feels like there's a lot of core foundational technologies and companies that have been building stuff and that the thing I look to is like this model from Simon Wardley where he sees that there's an evolution from an idea, academic idea, like at Eastmar. And then you have the custom bespoke enterprise applications, a lot of stuff that is being shown here at AWE. And eventually that crosses over into a consumer product. So we have even companies here like Snap and Niantic who've already made some of that jump into the consumer space. But some of the other hardware, so that's still mobile phone-based, but when you start to think about these head-mounted displays, and then eventually it gets in the consumer, and then maybe eventually it gets into the mass ubiquity. But I see this technological evolution, and having been into it for 14 years, I'm sure you've seen how that progression has happened from what you may see in an academic conference, and then eventually you see an exhibitor, and then eventually that comes out to a mass market for consumer products. maybe with what we start to see with whatever Apple starts to announce. So I'd love to hear how you see that evolution of the technology that's progressed over the years and what kind of things that you look to as indicators for where the market may be going.

[00:11:24.207] Ori Inbar: Well, I'm not doing predictions anymore. But I mean, it's taking much longer than we all thought it's going to take. That's very clear. You know, in 2014, I wrote a report about smart glasses because there was already quite a bit out there, a lot of companies innovating. And there was a trajectory that pointed towards arriving to somewhere around 2020, where you have massive adoption of smart glasses at the time. And now we're looking back, it didn't happen. And there's a lot of reasons for that, some hardware related, some cultural aspects. A lot of it is also the creator community, which is only really thriving in the last few years. So it's been a very kind of struggle over those years. I mentioned in the opening that XR is hard. And it's something I've been hearing consistently over the last 15 years, even now. And even my first pitch to investors for my startups in 2009, that's how I started. Because it's complex in many dimensions. But once again, I think the drive that we have and the fact that... I think we believe, people in the industry believe that the spatial computing, the ability to interact with the world just like we do in the real world will definitely push humanity into that direction at some point. So, you know, the last 40 years where we have interacted with 2D computing will be looked back as a weird era, I think. And, you know, it's just crazy to think that in... 1969, when the mother of all demos was presented, the same conference was also the first spatial computing demo. So they had sort of like the same head start, but we know how the history evolved since then, so it's really fascinating to look back.

[00:13:25.606] Kent Bye: I'd love to hear a little bit more about the aspect of the Augmented World Expo, which is about the community and community building, because you have over 400 speakers or so that's here. They're coming, and people are sharing their knowledge, but also this process of bringing the community together to be able to have this critical mass of folks, to have that threshold of the network effects of making it valuable enough for big companies to come here to show. For a number of years, I know Meta wasn't showing at different conferences, but Meta's here. You have Qualcomm. You have Magic Leap. You have Niantic and Snap. So, all these different companies are here, but also just the process of bringing the community together. So, I'd love to hear about that dimension of how you think about community building in this process of AWE.

[00:14:05.710] Ori Inbar: Yeah. I mean, we started it for that exact purpose of bringing together the few people that were working in the industry at the time, talking 2009, because I felt lonely. I was leading an AR startup and nobody understood me out there. When we found the community, we brought them together, and we felt that it's empowering us. And since then, it's been the same motto. So even though, you know, today we have 5,000 people meeting in the room, what most people tell me is that it still feels like a family reunion. You know, you see your friends, your colleagues, and every year, of course, there's new faces, new people, but it's still that sense of coming home because everyone is talking about the same concept. They share the same passion. so that's been really the big reason behind awe but also you know we've been pushing hard this idea that we of course we compete in some ways but we have to collaborate because if we work together in the face of in fact it's a hard thing to advance this industry we can overcome a lot of these challenges and i feel like that message has really propagated into the hearts of almost everyone in this conference over the years. And you see people working together much more than you see in other tech sectors sometimes. So that's really beautiful to see. And you know, when it comes to speakers, we're investing a lot of thought and time in curating the right people, the right mix, you know, the diverse set of topics of people from all over the world, you know, focusing of course on gender parity to try to lift female leaders, you know, whether it's speakers or startups that we invite here for the pitch competition. and i think it shows i mean it shows in the way people feel about each other in the conversation that you're seeing in the hallway you know those 460 speakers that we have this year they're all leaders in their specific fields and they bring they inspire you know certain groups in the community so when these communities get together magic happens because you know there's a lot of great conferences out there for you know ar and vr which are focused on specific sectors or topics and that's awesome but when you bring all of these together that's when unexpected things happen and you know i'm hearing from people here on the floor they're doing so much business so many connections they're getting inspired superlatives that you rarely see in conferences and that really warms my heart

[00:16:37.472] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I'm curious to hear some of your top experiences that you've had within AR that keep you excited about the medium.

[00:16:44.344] Ori Inbar: Over the years, you mean? Wow. That's a tough one, because so many things come to mind. For me, what really got me excited about AR is the ability to interact with the real world. Especially in the beginning, you had some experiences that were just trying to slap some content on the real world. And it was kind of a cool gimmick, but it didn't really make a difference in how we interact through smartphones with the world. But when I saw a few things where you had the ability to actually feel almost kind of not being able to distinguish between the air content in the real world that's when things started to really click for me and you know some early experiences at my uh air startup at documento so you know we're talking about 2009 10 you know iphone 3 everything extremely slow. But still, we're able to create things like a ring toss on a bottle of Dos Equis. That was kind of a campaign for them. But once you toss a virtual ring on your phone and it either clicks on the bottle or actually succeeds to score, it's such a huge satisfaction. It can feel like the physical world and the digital world can really be indistinguishable. And then, you know, that was kind of my motor in trying to guide, you know, a lot of the designers out there, a lot of the startups to try and find those situations where these things really mesh together. And today, of course, the hardware is better. You have a lot more smart glasses that are allowing you to have that kind of interaction. If you think about HoloLens when it first came out, that was a huge moment where they basically packed the best hardware on it. They had also some of the best software engineers working on that. And it just worked amazingly. Of course, still bulky. you know, getting hot and doesn't work for a long time. But it delivered experiences that we were just, you know, dreaming about. And then actually with the first Magic Leap, some of the experiences that they provided out of the box, it felt like, you know, they get it. This idea of creating a spatial experience where you walk around the room, where you interact with your hands, not with controllers. That was a big one for me. And then on and on. I can count on and on about that.

[00:19:15.984] Kent Bye: Well, what are some of the big highlights for you for this year's edition of Augmented World Expo?

[00:19:20.768] Ori Inbar: I mean, number one, I love the feel of the community that I saw here this week. The collaboration, the excitement, the fact that despite some of the things people may have heard in the media, or maybe even from some other people, Things are actually moving forward and moving forward really fast. And the energy was just incredible. The Expo Hall, you know, almost 300 exhibitors, so I love them all. I tried something that I've never even imagined is there. It's called the Exit Suit, which allows you to just, you know, become free from the ground. You don't have to walk anymore in VR. You can actually fly facing forward or backwards and... That was just a mind-blowing experience for me, especially because it's built as an open-source hardware solution. So you can see that, although it's still in a very early stage, it's still clunky in some ways, but it has a huge potential. Just kind of one guy that had an idea to free us from the need to walk around or to teleport with VR, which sometimes we know is very limiting, and he did it, you know, and now it's here. So it's really fantastic to see that.

[00:20:34.784] Kent Bye: Awesome. And for you, what do you think the ultimate potential of augmented reality and XR might be and what it might be able to enable?

[00:20:44.273] Ori Inbar: So, you know, I've been talking for many years about the fact that XR gives us superpowers. The idea that it helps us become more intelligent. It helps us become more engaged with the world, whether it's a physical or a virtual world. It completely changes how we interact with the world and brings us back to how humans evolved over the last million years, which is, you know, you look at an object, you look at it from different sides, and it can reach out your hand and hold it, and now you can actually do it with digital content. So think about taking all the digital information in the world, even what we have today, which is so much, and you bring it into the real world or the virtual world. That, I think, brings humanity to a whole new level. And if you think about to create also new content in these kind of environments in a much more natural way, more intuitive way, then I think the way that people communicate could evolve into a whole new thing. I mean, right now we're communicating mostly with text and verbal language. And by nature, I think humans are much more visual and more kind of gestures oriented. Again, because that's how we evolved over the last million years. So now we can take advantage of these roots of humanity and help us really get to a whole new level of achievement, you know, as humans. And then, you know, when you throw in AI and kind of the threat that many people feel from it, you can see how, I mean, with a tongue in cheek, we can say that it helps us compete with AI in a better way because it gives us kind of a way to interact with it and to leverage it instead of compete with it.

[00:22:27.441] Kent Bye: Awesome. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?

[00:22:32.423] Ori Inbar: That was a quick deep dive that I wasn't expecting on the way. But I think what I want to say to everybody is let's keep on keeping it on. This passion community will continue to work on it. We need and want more to join it. And I think once you get the bug, you just cannot not do it. I think we're on our way. We've gone a significant way already. And in a few years, I think we'll get to where we want to be. I mean, it's not like in a year or two or three, it will be the end of the road. This is probably a few decades of evolution, but you can see it's already happening now.

[00:23:12.870] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Ori, thanks so much for joining me today and help to cultivate this community for its 14th anniversary. And you've got 300 exhibitors and 460 speakers and 5,000 people here. It's a great opportunity for bringing the community together. It's here in the United States, Europe, and Asia. So there's other places and meetups that people can go to as well. So check out for that if there's one in your area. But yeah, thanks again for helping create this whole community and for joining me here today to help explain your journey and talk about what it is about AR that gives you inspiration and tickles your imagination. So thank you.

[00:23:45.496] Ori Inbar: Thank you, Kent. It's been a pleasure talking with you today.

[00:23:49.398] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is part of the podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.

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#1590: AWE Past & Present Series: Ori Inbar on the Founding of Augmented World Expo to Cultivate the XR Community