Augmented World Expo announces call for nominations for 6th annual Auggie Awards

Augmented World Expo has opened nominations for its annual Auggie Awards. Now in its sixth year, the Auggie Awards are back to celebrate excellence in augmented reality. Every year, the best of the best in the Augmented World compete for the one-of-a-kind Auggie Trophy and sponsored prizes in numerous categories for both hardware and software. Winners of the 2015 Auggie Awards will be announced at Augmented World Expo on June 9, 2015 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA. Nominations may be submitted on the Augmented World Expo website. The Auggies promote excellence in augmented reality across various platforms and categories worldwide. The awards are consistent with AugmentedReality.org’s mission to educate, connect, and hatch new initiatives in the augmented world, and AugmentedReality.org’s global goal to inspire adoption towards the goal of 1 billion active AR users by 2020, AugmentedReality.org is co-sponsoring this competition, offering award trophies and additional prizes. “In 2014, over one hundred nominations were submitted to the Auggies and ten products were awarded the prestigious trophy,” said CEO of AugmentedReality.org and Augmented World Expo producer, Ori Inbar. “With the accelerated growth and maturity of the industry we expect a new record in quantity and quality in 2015.” This year’s Auggies is made-up of ten categories, including Best Smart Glasses, Best AR Application, Best AR Enterprise Solution, Best Hardware, Best Game or Toy, and Best Sci-Fi-to-Reality. Nominations are open now until April 30. Public voting will begin May 1 through to the end of May to help select the finalists that will move on to the judging by our esteemed panel. In addition to kicking off the sixth annual Auggie Awards, Augmented World Expo is pleased to announce the addition of Google’s Project Tango Lead Johnny Lee as a keynote speaker at this year’s event. Lee will be present some of the underlying technologies that are making Project Tango possible such as hardware sensors and software algorithms. Project Tango is set to change computer vision and robotics by concentrating this technology into a mobile device. The Google team is developing smartphones and tablets that can track 3D motion and create 3D models of the environment around it allowing you to map the world around you in real-time. In doing so, Tango unlocks some unique opportunities in directions, dimensions and environmental maps as well as the creation of immersive augmented reality experiences that merge the digital and the physical world. Before Project Tango, Lee helped Google X explore new projects as Rapid Evaluator and was a core algorithms contributor to the original Xbox Kinect. His YouTube videos demonstrating Wii remote hacks have surpassed over 15 million views and became one of the most popular TED talk videos. In 2008, he received his PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University and has been recognized in MIT Technology Review’s TR35. “3D-fying the world, or creating 3D maps of everything, is key to the future of the Augmented World and Johnny Lee’s charismatic personality has been instrumental in rallying the troops towards this vision,” said Inbar “I can’t wait to see inspire us all at Augmented World Expo.” Augmented World Expo, now in its sixth year, is the world’s largest international event for AWE 2015 will be held June 8-10, 2015 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Tickets can be purchased at www.augmentedworldexpo.com.   Augmented World Expo (AWE) is the world’s largest conference for professionals focused on making the world more interactive – featuring technologies such as Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Wearable Computing, Smart Glasses, Gesture and Sensors devices, and The Internet of Things. Now in our sixth year, AWE 2015 is our biggest event yet with over 3,000 tech professionals, 200 demos, 100+ AWE-inspiring talks and over 150 participating companies. Tickets are on sale now....