Introduction

I wanted to drop a quick note that I am going to be at AR/VR/MR 2025 next week and am looking forward to meeting people and seeing technology. If you want to meet with me, please email meet@kgontech.com. While mentioning AR/VR/MR, I thought it would be good to give my perspective on the conferences I plan to attend (or in the case of CES attended) this year, including CES, SID Display Week, and Augmented World Expo (AWE).

I’m in the process of sifting through the information from more than 20 companies I met with at CES 2025. If there was an overall impression, it was that there are many (greater than a dozen) “AI” Glasses with a Small (~30-degree) display introduced in 2025. Most of these will be somewhat minimalist, with a mass of 30 to 50 grams, often with waveguides and green MicroLEDs in the AWE 2024 Panel: The Current State and Future Direction of AR Glasses that I participated in last June.

There is considerable overlap between what I discover at CES and AR/VR/MR. Since the two conferences are close together in the calendar, I plan to put out a series of articles based on the combined information.

I Will Be a Panelist at AR/VR/MR 2025 on Wed at 4:05 PM

While on the subject of AI/AR glasses and panel discussions, I have been invited to be a panelist on the AI and AR Panel on Wednesday, 29 January 2025 • 4:05 PM – 4:55 PM PST on the Main Stage (Level 3), which is the closing session of the conference. A description of the panel is given below:

With the commercial success of Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, a renewed interest of contextual AI glasses is growing worldwide. Aiming to be stylish and wearable anywhere anytime, the AI glasses come with different capabilities, some are without a display, some are monocular or binocular, monochrome or full-color, some feature simple voice assistants, some feature multimodal AI. Come join us to hear more from our industry expert panelists.

My Perspective On CES, AR/VR/MR, SID Display Week, and AWE Conferences for AR and MR

I’m often asked about the various conferences and which ones to attend. For most of the last ten years, I have attended CES, AR/VR/MR, and AWE while occasionally attending SID Display Week. I will occasionally venture out to other events around the world, but these are my go-to conferences, being based in the United States. I thought I would outline how I have come to pick these four conferences.

SPIE AR/VR/MR (San Francisco Moscone Center at the end of January)

AR/VR/MR is my favorite conference of the year. What I affectionately call Bernard Kress’s AR/VR/MR Circus, as Benard started the conference and has been the head of it. I find the technical content of the presentations to be very educational and accessible, even for those who are not optical professionals. It is the only show I go to where I go to the presentations anymore.

The exposition part of AR/VR/MR has grown substantially over the years, and there are many interesting exhibits. The exhibits will generally cover optics (particularly waveguides), some display devices (MicroLED, LCOS, and Laser Scanning), eye tracking, EMG input, electrochromic dimming, and several optical/headset measurement companies. It used to be that the expo was so small you could easily see everything presentations. But now I end up missing presentations so I can spend more time at the expo. Fortunately, most of the presentations are recorded (and available behind SPIE’s membership paywall).

What you don’t see at AR/VR/MR typically are complete headsets (other than in the “Museum”) like you would at CES or AWE. AR/VR/MR is more for finding the building blocks. While AR/VR/MR has the smallest expo, there is a very high concentration of AR/VR/MR technology. While the name AR/VR/MR is “inclusive” of VR and MR, to be clear, Optical see-through AR technology and presentations dominate.

Once you are at the conference, the logicists are simple except for any suite meetings, which are usually within walking distance. Both the exposition floor and presentation stage are next to each other, so it is easy to circulate back and forth. With many of the same people attending every year and the relatively smaller size of the AR/VR/MR conference and expo, this conference has more of a sense of community than the others (AWE is also good in terms of sense of community, but it may have lost a bit of that since the move to Long Beach).

The AR/VR/MR conference is held in conjunction with SPIEs Photonics West, which is held in the much larger main Moscone convention center (AR/VR/MR is in the smaller Moscone West). Photonics West has different optical components, but very little is directly related to AR/VR/MR. It becomes a bit of a needle-in-a-haystack problem to find anything at the Photonics West Expo directly related to AR (they are all at the smaller AR/VR/MR expo in Moscone West), and I generally only spend half a day there the day after the AR/VR/MR conference.

SID Display Week (San Jose May 11-16th, Expo May 13-15th)

SID Display Week is, as its name says, all about displays, both big and small. There is very little about optics. DisplayWeek has many presentation sessions related to the technology and business of displays. Still, these days, I go to Display Week to meet with companies that have AR and VR display devices to show. This is “the” place to find out about display devices for AR and VR. There will be multiple LCOS, MicroLED, Micro-OLED, and Laser companies at Display Week. Last year, I was surprised by the level of activity in LCOS and MicroLEDs. There were some companies at Display Week that didn’t go to other AR/VR-related conferences.

AWE (Long Beach June 10-12th)

AWE (Augmented World Expo) moved to Long Beach last year from their long-time home in Santa Clara. The Long Beach venue is larger. The presentation seems to me to focus on the business and personal side of mixed reality and is less technical than, say, AR/VR/MR. I generally try to attend the panel sessions (and I was on one last year and might be again this year).

My favorite part of AWE has always been the expo and getting to see many different headsets all in one exposition hall. There are likely more total headsets at CES, but they are all over Las Vegas, and it is impossible to get to all of them, whereas AWE collects everything in one place where you can see everything. With the move to Long Beach last year, it seemed to me like there were fewer total headsets than in the prior years at Santa Clara. I noticed a trend where more companies were showing AR/VR/MR software technology running on other companies’ headsets, particularly on Meta’s Quest and Apple’s Vision Pro, rather than their custom headset hardware.

CES (Las Vegas at the beginning Of January)

I have been going to CES off and on since the late 1980s when I was working on graphics processors at Texas Instruments. I have been going to CES for most of the years since 1999 with various companies and for the last 14 years for this blog.

Nothing brings the world together on consumer electronics like CES. I go to CES to see AR/MR headset products for the most part. Many companies aim their new AR/VR/MR product announcements around CES. However, CES is a logistical nightmare, with various companies scattered all over the Las Vegas area. While I typically see about 20 AR/MR-related companies at CES, I always miss some companies that I only find out about from word of mouth or watching YouTube about CES at night, either when it is too late to make it to them or after the show.

Central Hall’s AR/VR Area

CES has had a dedicated AR/VR area for many years (the last few years in LVCC Central Hall and, before that, South Hall). However, I estimate that less than a quarter of all the AR headsets at CES will be found there. With the move from South Hall to Central Hall a few years ago, the smaller and newer AR companies, for the most part, have disappeared from the dedicated AR/VR area and, to a degree, relocated to the Venetian Expo.

The Venetian Expo

Most of the smaller and newer AR companies will be found in the Venetian Expo, often in “zones” sponsored by countries or other sponsors (such as crowd funders Jellops and Kickstarter) or in CES’s “Enterprize Zone.” Knowing that there is an AR/VR company in a given “zone” is often difficult. The “Zone Companies” are minimally described, if at all, in the CES online directory, which makes pre-show planning difficult. The Venetian expo has a confusing layout with a crazy numbering system (if you can call it a system). This year, I had too many other commitments in suites to run the whole of the Venetian Expo.

Suites (Venetian/Pallazo, Aria, West Gate, Wynn/Encore, Bellagio, etc.)

Often, the most interesting and informative information about companies is only discussed in hotel suites. The show floor information is meant for more mass consumption to bring companies making products together with the media and corporate buyers (not direct consumers). Some companies will have a meeting room in their booth, but many will have hotel suites either in addition to or without a booth.

Private meetings often involve getting into more detail and are held with key people at the company. Booth demos have to cycle a lot of people through, and there is no time to get into details. Most of the people manning the booth are there to collect information and give demos and are not able to give technical or strategic information; at best, they can direct you to someone who is able to talk details that may be somewhere around the boot, but often more technical and management people are going to be in private meetings (in the booth or in suites). My media badge and this blog’s reputation can often get me to the “right people” if they are available.

Media Events (ShowStoppers, PepCom, CES Unveiled)

There are several official media events, including ShowStoppers (the first day of the expo), PepPcom (the day before the expo), and CES Unveiled (two days before the expo). These events are just for the companies to show off to the media. They typically have a mix of startup/small companies with a few name brands that could best be described as an eclectic mix of products and gadgets. Some companies might only be at these events, while others will also have booths. There might be one to as many as four AR/VR-related companies at these events. I’ve only attended ShowStoppers (at the Bellagio) as it is after the show floor closes on the first day.

CES Logistics

Getting around CES is famously a nightmare. Even if you are willing to pay for taxis, Uber, and Lyft, the Las Vegas road becomes gridlocked, particularly for the first two days of CES. The “Express Shuttle” between the Venetian and the LVCC can take over an hour by the time you wait for several busses and through traffic during the busy times of the day, for what is about a 30-minute walk. To save on walking, I typically take the monorail as it dependably takes about 25 minutes, including a walk from the monorail station (take the elevator to street level) to/from the Venetian. Even on the last day of the show, around midday, it can take about a half hour to get on an “express” bus plus travel time.

I stayed at a hotel near the Vegas Loop’s Riviera Station (north side of West Hall), which makes it convenient to get to Central Hall in the morning.

The Venetian/Pallazo suites are convenient, and I can fill time between suite visits with the Venetian Expo. Westgate (formerly the Las Vegas Hilton) used to be popular, but I have not had meetings there for a few years. Even though it is “close” to the convention center, it is about a 15-minute walk from the AR/VR area in the central hall by the time you get through the north hall and through the Westgate to where the suites are located. Back when AR/VR was in South Hall, I used to get a monorail day pass and take the Monorail to the Westgate.

This year, I was in Central Hall and had a meeting at the Encore. I used the Las Vegas (Tesla) Loop to get from Central to West Hall and then a 10-minute walk to the Encore. From the Encore was another 10-15 minute walk to the Pallazo/Venetian.

It seems that a lot of companies are moving to the south side of the strip, and I had two meetings on different days at the Aria. I was able to use the small train that goes between the Aria and the Bellagio to get to ShowStoppers. Getting to these meetings is a big time investment. You have to figure at least a half hour each way (and over an hour if you take a shuttle bus), plus suite meetings generally last about an hour. So it can be a 2-hour plus time commitment. I try to schedule these South Strip Hotel suite meetings at the end of the day and then take an Uber/Lift back to the hotel or a dinner meeting.

I rarely find the shuttle busses that CES provides convenient/practical for a “media person” who has to get to several venues in a day. I did get lucky and caught the Venetian to Aria shuttle bus twice right before it left. If I had just missed the bus, it would have been a 20-minute wait. As there is no published timetable for hotel shuttles, you have to allow at least an hour of total time (wait plus travel).

I like to do breakfast meetings before the show opens or dinner meetings after the show floor closes as a way to stretch the day. For breakfast, I would like them to be near either the Vegas Loop or the Venetian.