AWE Celebrates Innovation and Legacy in a Landmark Year for the XR Industry

LONG BEACH, Calif., June 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Augmented World Expo USA 2026, the longest-running and largest event dedicated to Augmented Reality, Extended Reality, Virtual Reality, robotics and AI, today revealed this year's award winners across every category, honoring both the industry's newest breakthroughs and the pioneers who built the field.

This year, 20 of the world's most innovative and game-changing developers, brands and creators were honored with Auggie Awards, while 8 pioneers of XR were inducted into the 2026 XR Hall of Fame.

2026 XR Hall of Fame
Eight pioneers of XR were celebrated by the 2026 XR Hall of Fame, recognizing their lasting contributions to the field. The full list of inductees can be viewed here.

From the Show Floor
AWE USA 2026 was packed with exciting news from exhibitors including Google, Samsung, Qualcomm, and more. See highlights of announcements from the show here.

Auggie Awards
Since 2010, the Auggie Awards have stood as the most recognized XR and spatial computing awards in the world. Now in their 17th year, the Auggies continue to showcase the very best the industry has to offer. This year's winners are:

Best Art or Film – D-Day: The Camera Soldier by TARGO: An interactive documentary following a D-Day combat cameraman through his daughter's journey to piece together his hidden legacy; a 20-minute experience with TIME Studios, exclusively on Apple Vision Pro. Video here.

Best Campaign – Toyota - FanPort by Draw & Code: A 12m mixed reality installation launching the Toyota Urban Cruiser in Italy, moving 'holographic' content between a projected display and Magic Leap 2 glasses for a shared multisensory experience. Video here.

Best Consumer App – Google Maps XR: Immersive View for Android XR fuses 2D mapping with photorealistic 3D data, letting users explore the world and step inside locations via hand and gaze input. Video here.

Best Content Creation Tool – MetaNeural Immersive Simulation Platform: An AI-powered tool that lets experts generate complex, nonlinear simulation scenarios in natural language—no coding—for high-risk training in energy, defense, and manufacturing. Video here.

Best Content Creator(s) – Gabriele Romagnoli: Recognized for educational XR content on LinkedIn and his XR/AI Spotlight Podcast, showcasing cutting-edge work from avatars to Gaussian Splats. Video here.

Best Developer Tool – MultiSet AI: A scan-agnostic visual positioning system delivering centimeter-accurate 6-DoF localization and object tracking across multi-floor indoor and outdoor environments, deployable on cloud or device. Video here.

Best Education & Training Solution – NICS Korea: Chemical Incident & Terror Response in XR by National Institute of Chemical Safety: A nationwide XR training system with fixed VR centers, mobile units, and 80+ scenarios for chemical emergency response and multi-agency collaboration. Video here.

Best Enterprise Solution – FabStation by Eterio Realities Inc.: An AR execution layer for structural steel fabrication that overlays 3D models onto workpieces, capturing data at 1.5mm accuracy—230+ customers across 30+ countries, with a 75% reduction in errors. Video here.

Best Game or Toy – Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow by Vertigo Games: The legendary Thief franchise reimagined for VR, returning players to The City to master stealth and uncover an artifact holding a legacy from the past. Video here.

Best Headworn Device – Spectacles by Specs Inc.: Fifth-generation standalone see-through AR glasses with a 46-degree field of view, 13ms motion-to-photon latency, and on-device multimodal AI, powered by Snap OS. Video here.

Best Healthcare & Wellness Solution – ARVIS by Enovis: A wearable AR headset for orthopedic surgical navigation that replaces bulky robotics, delivering precise intraoperative guidance via an intuitive 3D display with hands-free voice and gaze control. Video here.

Best Indie Creator(s) – Year of the Cicadas: A VR experience about a mother's life after losing her six-year-old son, spanning a seventeen-year timeline anchored by the Brood X cicadas and driven by ambisonic and spatial audio. Video here.

Best Interaction Product – Be There Without Being There: Humanoid Robot Immersive Telepresence by Carolina Cruz-Neira & Judah Rowe: Immersive teleoperation lets users inhabit a humanoid robot in real time with full-body motion mapping, while it streams a live digital twin of its surroundings. Video here.

Best Location-Based Entertainment – Interstellar Arc by Felix & Paul Studios: The largest contiguous high-fidelity wireless VR environment ever created, spanning 20,000+ square feet and transporting hundreds of synchronized participants aboard an interstellar spaceship. Video here.

Best Reality Capture – Cintoo VR Experience: An Unreal Engine-based platform streaming reality capture data at high fidelity, with multi-mesh streaming that lets industrial teams explore massive scan and BIM datasets at 1:1 and doll-house scale. Video here.

Best Societal Impact – Cooper's Clean Air Quest: Making Invisible Pollution Visible by YORD: A family-friendly VR and web experience with the City of Cupertino that makes invisible air pollution tangible, guided by Cooper the robot, now traveling across schools and festivals. Video here.

Best Use of AI – XR Vibe Coding with XR Blocks and Gemini by Google: A toolkit built with Android XR that turns Gemini's 3D web creations into immersive extended-reality experiences, letting anyone translate ideas into 3D and share them via a web URL. Video here.

Most Ethical Product – SecureMR by PICO/ByteDance: A 'Privacy Vault' architecture that lets developers build mixed reality with scene perception while locking away the camera feed, using a 'Zero-Trust' sandbox to protect users' homes. Video here.

Startup to Watch – PROLO by CG Technologies

Art Festival Winner – Reality Looks Back by Superposition XR Studio

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SOURCE AWE (Augmented World Expo)