Augmented World Expo (AWE) isn’t just one of the longest-running conferences focused on immersive tech, it’s also become the most important annual XR conference on our calendar.

In the early days there were many industry conferences that had a significant draw for the pioneers of XR’s modern epoch. There were XR pockets within big tech conferences like CES, GDC, and E3. There were company-specific events like Oculus Connect and Unity’s Vision Summit. And there were early grass-roots events like SVVR, VRLA, and a host of local meetups across the globe that built lasting networks of XR believers.

While many of these events have since faded, the connections they fostered have not. More than any other XR conference that I’ve attended, AWE USA feels like the event that has absorbed the spirit of those early conferences.

Since I started attending AWE USA in 2018, the conference has only grown and offered increasingly more interesting and valuable sessions, exhibitors, and networking. It has steadily evolved into what I consider the must-go event for the XR industry. Despite its scale, it carries the torch of passion that ignited the XR space back when it was little more than kickstarters, meetups, and those crazy enough to believe that immersive tech was not only possible to build, but worth building.

Headset museum at AWE 2024

That’s why I’m proud to announce that Road to VR is joining AWE USA 2025 as the event’s Premiere Media Partner.

In addition to our usual reporting from the event, we’ll be highlighting the most interesting sessions and exhibitors ahead of the show, facilitating giveaways from AWE partners, and offering an exclusive 20% discount on tickets to AWE USA 2025. Super Early Bird All Access passes are available now for a limited time—there won’t be a better deal!

AWE USA 2025 will be held in Long Beach, California from June 10th to 12th, and it’s expected to be the biggest yet, with more than 6,000 attendees, 300 exhibitors, 400 speakers, and a 150,000 Sqft expo floor.

While the event has long hosted intriguing sessions and a wide range of exhibitors from the biggest XR companies to the scrappiest startups, the ‘Playground’ section of the expo floor has become a unique place for developers and creators to premiere immersive experiences of all kinds—from games to art and all the creative places in between.

AWE USA’s annual afterparty is also a place where I’m always excited to see familiar faces from across the industry, while making new connections in this ever-growing industry.

If we could only attend a single conference in 2025, AWE USA would be our choice. And we think it should be yours too!

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Christian Schildwaechter

    AWE USA 2025 […] 6,000 attendees, 300 exhibitors, 400 speakers, and a 150,000 Sqft expo floor.

    I automatically drew comparisons to gamescom 2015, the first time I tried PCVR. The arrival of consumer VR made big headlines expecting a bright future: "try […] various models of virtual reality headsets at many of the stands. A sneak peek at the future of virtual reality […] Sony with Project Morpheus, Oculus VR with Rift and HTC with Vive. […] allow gamers to delve deeper than ever before"

    gamescom 2015 drew 345K visitors (58 AWE) with 806 exhibitors (2.7 AWE) on 2077K sqft (18 AWE). Somewhat apples to oranges, as AWE is a conference with attached exhibition, while gamescom is an industry trade show mostly open to the public that makes up 90% of the visitors, with the devcon conference attached. But VR featured prominently at gamescom 2015 and 2016 with hours long queues at Oculus and all HTC demo spots booked out in advance, both companies having huge booths with 5-10 parallel demo stations. It's a bit depressing that the largest VR event now draws a tiny fraction of the audience.

    Anything at AWE 2025 will be more advanced, still my expectations for the impact is much lower than in 2015. And even that had already been dampened, as the first time trying VR was in the mid 90s with Virtual Research's "Flight Helmet", 360*240/eye on 100°FoV at 4x the weight of Quest 3, still obviously the future. By 2015 I had already waited 20 years for this future to commence. VR apparently takes way more time to develop than I hoped, use cases beyond the obvious gaming, simulation and visualization even longer. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/53f1228f2cd25b2750900ccb7979303e06ba488b4dd50c56325936a6ddef1927.jpg

  • I agree, AWE USA is the place to be for XR people. There are other interesting events, like the Immersive Tech Week, AWE Europe, Laval, Stereopsia, etc… but they are smaller than AWE US.

  • Christian Schildwaechter

    During the long journey hardware/XR stack improved to where they now rarely constitute a fundamental limit. More FoV, pixels or GPU power will improve realism, but there are already a myriad of options only requiring simple shading with 100K polygons/sec. And for regular people, Quest 1 opened VR as a 3D medium enabling things difficult to do in 2D.

    With creating models as a major hurdle for 3D printer use, I was hoping for a VR Tinkercad to combine simple shapes into complex objects and intuitively stretch or cut them to fit with hands/controllers. Or an interactive VR physics sandbox for teaching classical mechanics through shooting stuff out of cannons or tossing planets into solar orbits. Or file browsers filling the room with 3D branches of nested files and directories instead of squeezed into flat 2D file treea. Or virtual Ikea build instruction helping people to overcome their hex key phobia.

    Content creation is hard, but many more uses taking advantage of VR's 6DoF space and interaction were possible for years. Yet most XR productivity talk is about running desktop/mobile 2D apps, or even worse, simulating 2D monitors, wasting VR's benefits. Only scratching the surface of VR's possibilities isn't surprising though, given that major uses for smartphones with the power of former supercomputers are cat videos, ordering pizza and doom scrolling. VR hardware is already fine, but non-game/sim/viz use conceptually seems somewhat stuck in the stone age. There is still a lot of road ahead.

    • guest

      There have existed things similar to what you mention like: file browsers filling the room with 3D branches of nested files and directories instead of squeezed into flat 2D file tree. There was a great experimental interface that Autodesk had in the 1980's where the everything was like a room of map-cabinets. There's still code out there to do this stuff, but the big tech companies have the "not invented here" attitude toward it, so someday they will have to eventually reinvent the wheel.