AWE 2023 was a blast! We got on stage for our panel Meet the Makers, and then again for the Auggie Awards with Big Rock Creative (winning the award for best indie creators!)
Our Panel: Meet the Makers
As the team that executed the first volumetric live streamed red carpet awards at the 3rd annual Polys Awards, we joined Ben Erwin, Julie Smithson, James George and Elena Piech on stage. We discussed how we pulled off using Scatter’s Depthkit at ZeroSpace to allow hosts and guests to volumetrically step into our virtual Polys Red Carpet Theater.
During this panel a new series was debuted: Meet the Makers. Following the WebXR Summit Series, Meet The Makers moves past the “what and the how”, to focus on the “Who” of the Metaverse; the people building it.
Following our discussion, we got great questions from the audience by Steve Van Loon, Gregory Panos and Steve Lewis. Also present in the front were Lorenzo Vallone of Cleanbox Technology and Simeone Scaramozzino.
Pictures shot during the panel are courtesy of Rolando Masís-Obando. The large group picture was shot by Celeste Lear, featuring our panel as well as the rest of the Polys WebXR family: Sophia Moshasha, Karen Alexander, Rolando Masís-Obando, Lauren Moulder, Robin Moulder and Claire Weingarten. Missing from the big pic: our Director, Ginna Lambert, Mark Lambert, and Cory Allen.
Thank you to Ori Inbar, Sonya Haskins, and our track chair Jeremy Babb for hosting our community at AWE 2023!
VIDEO: Watch Our Panel “Meet The Makers” Below
The 2023 Auggie Awards
The Auggie Awards is AWE’s awards ceremony. Prior to the Augmented World Expo, the public submits nominations and then votes for their favorites across different Auggies categories. Then the finalists go in front of a panel of distinguished judges for the final selections of winners.
We grabbed a spot to watch the Auggies at AWE with Ben Erwin (The Poly’s WebXR Awards) and Matt Cool (Mozilla Hubs).
As we watched, we came to the Best Indie Creators Award segment. Ori Inbar introduced Christopher Lafayette (founder of GatherVerse) to announce the finalists and present the award.
Among the finalists for Best Indie Creators were:
- Big Rock Creative
- Alien Rescue by the MetaMovie
- xRT by Tampere University
- Table Towers by DB Creations
- OnBoardXR
Winning an Auggie Award is a pleasant surprise for finalists. So when we saw Big Rock Creative pop up on screen, as well as video clips from one of the BRCvr worlds we created for the virtual burning man (The BRCvr EcoZone), we got excited!
“And our winner is… Give it up for Big Rock Creative!“
Christopher Lafayette
It was a great feeling to hop up on stage with Big Rock Creative, a powerhouse of community engaged projects! We’ve worked with Big Rock Creative a lot over the years, including helping with the building, community engagement/workshops & launch of the first BRCvr virtual playa as well as its return, the launch of the VR Golden Apple Comic Book Shop for virtual comic cons, and we even joined them on playa for Burning Man 2022 to assist with the 360 & 180 stereoscopic video art capture + interviews project. The Big Rock Creative crew has also provided event support for multiple worlds we built for large-scale social VR event, like the Baba Yaga Red Carpet premiere, the YOUNGA BridgingTheGap concert with Pitbull, and the ActNowVR series in cooperation with DreamlandXR.
Photo courtesy of the article “Celebrating the 2023 Auggie Awards and XR Prize Challenge” by Jon Joehnig on ARPost. Thanks for the shoutout!
“All of us in this room are indie creators, and we create through collaboration. Communal Effort is my favorite principle of Burning Man because it brings us all together to create things larger than we can do ourselves, and this amazing team came together to create so many wonderful projects including BRCvr.“
Athena Demos
You can watch the AWE 2023 Auggie Awards below:
This was Part 1 of 2 AWE 2023 posts.
See more in Part 2 below:
See AWE 2023 Part 2: What We Saw In The Expo Hall With Friends »