Should you attend XR events? Pros and cons of going to exhibitions

It’s the end of the year, and like every December, it is the time to make a balance about how the past year went. There is a particular aspect of my professional year I want to tell you about and it is the attendance at XR events.

This year, since my main job vanished and so I had more time, I decided to attend more XR-related events and see what outcomes I could obtain from these opportunities. I’ve traveled really a lot, visiting countries like Italy (my country), China, the USA, Finland, England, Germany, and the Czech Republic, to name a few. It’s been an interesting experience, where I felt like a rockstar doing a world tour. Now that my 2024 world tour is finished, and I am preparing for my next year (that starts with a new trip to CES), it is the right time to take stock of all these trips and all the events I attended and examine what I invested to go there and what I obtained in exchange.

Since I always like to share the knowledge I get with you, I’m writing for you the result of this thorough analysis I did, listing what I think are the pros and cons of attending our industry events, and adding some personal pieces of advice to help you in deciding what to attend and what not.

Me trying the Vive Focus Vision at Match XR

Let me give you a list of the reasons why you should go to XR events.

One of the most important reasons why we go to physical events is to enlarge our network of people we know in our field. For sure creating connections on social media is important, but when you are in a place where there are thousands of people all operating in XR, it is very easy to make many new XR friends.

There are also some people that are not very reactive on social media or who get too many connection requests and so are blocking most people (have you ever had a connection request blocked on Linkedin because you were asked the email of the other person?), so it’s hard to socialize with them online, but if you are in front of them in real life, it is easy to get a connection. There are some opportunities to meet people in a physical event that are just unbeatable.

Events also invite important speakers, who are totally out of your league, but you may have a chance to meet when you are there. For instance, thanks to AWE US I have made a picture with the previous Unity CEO John Riccitiello (there is also a fun story associated with him), and with the father of modern VR Palmer Luckey.

After 10 years, I managed to meet him! It was a magical moment for me

I always say that the network of people you know is one of the most precious assets you have in your professional life, so it’s very valuable to go to physical events to enlarge it. Sometimes just one person that you have met during an event can be a revolution for your working life for the upcoming years. For instance, I met the game designer Max Ariani at a Global Game Jam event, and around one year later, we together created our consultancy agency New Technology Walkers, and a few years later, our mixed reality game HitMotion: Reloaded.

It’s not that you only make many connections, but you also manage to create deeper and more meaningful connections. Social media interactions are usually snackable, but when you are in person, you manage to spend even a long time with other people, and do interesting activities or have profound conversations. I love social media, I love XR, but nothing beats meeting in person yet.

When you meet in person, sometimes you can also create a deep connection with someone very quickly and then this bond remains for many years later. I have some nice examples of this happening to me in recent years. One of them is Christian Steiner that I met at the XRCC in Berlin around 6 months ago: we got along so well in the three days of the event that we are still very connected now. But there are many other examples, like a person I met at AWE US in Los Angeles, or another one I met in China almost two years ago.

Christian Steiner was one of the mentors of the XRCC event, so we had the occasion to spend a long time together (Image by XRCC)

A deep connection with someone is more valuable than 10 shallow connections. A person you are friends with is a person that enriches your life, at first personally, and then also professionally. If you need some help with your work, this person is for sure willing to help you, while the other guy you just met and exchanged business cards with is not going to care.

Be careful that you can’t force a strong connection with someone, you just have to be a fit. But I strongly suggest you look for this kind of meaningful connection during your trips: if I look back at my many trips in 2024, this is the most valuable thing I got from them.

Christian Steiner and me during the XRCC party: work hard, play hard they say…

Every event has some sort of after party, or dinner together, or just moments with people going around the city and chill. Every event has some fun moments: some are more hardcore, others are more relaxed, but all of them have it. And they are all fantastic: there’s nothing better than just spending some fun moments with the people of the VR communities!

Fun is good for the spirit because it lets you vent away the stress and feel happier. But it is also good to create the deeper connections I was mentioning you above. I usually say that the day of the event is when you exchange the business cards, and then the evening is when you truly become friends with people.

A selfie with me, AWE’s head Ori Inbar, and Pico’s Heitor Bravi. There is also the nape of SyncReality’s Cyril Tuschi

Of course, you want to go to events also to meet people to have business with. You may be seeking partners or customers, and at tech events, you can meet both of them. Many people from many companies participate in the biggest XR events: if you do your homework and organize some meaningful meetings before departing, you can have opportunities you wouldn’t have had by staying at home. Sometimes, if people do not answer on social media to your meeting request, you can even just wait for them to go off the stage if they are speakers, and have a chance to speak with them.

I myself have discussed many business opportunities at VR events: for instance, when I was at AWE US, one of the main reasons for me to be there was to talk in person with people of a certain company to evaluate collaborations related to the development of VR applications.

We are in 2024, and all of us are used to Zoom, Teams, Meet, and all these pieces of software. I have signed my contracts remotely, but the trust that you get by meeting someone in person is still incomparable. And if you are good at selling, also in person you have more opportunities to “convince” the other person to collaborate with you (unluckily I’m not a great sales guy, though…).

Me on the AWE EU stage talking about Mixed Reality (Thanks Maud Clavier for the photo)

Being the guy that attends many events around the world is always cool. And it sounds even cooler if you are a speaker at those events. Especially if the events are well-known and they feature very important speakers: saying “oh, I’m speaking at the same event of the CEO of Unity” makes you look immediately important. Then of course you don’t mention that the CEO of Unity was speaking in the main room in front of 500 people, while you had your talk in the toilets with just the janitor listening to you…

VR events have been beneficial the most for my job as a VR blogger. This is because usually at them you can try the latest XR headsets and glasses, the latest games, some new innovative prototypes, and so on. Sometimes you can even try some future devices behind closed doors and get exclusive demos. I don’t have a Vision Pro at home because it is too expensive, but I tried it multiple times at XR events around the world. The same for the Shiftall MeganeX 8K, the Pico 4 Ultra, and the Somnium VR1: these are all devices I have been able to try only because of this year’s trips. I have also been able to try very futuristic gadgets like smart contact lenses. When I show people the photo of me going hands-on with Mojo Lens contact lenses, everyone looks at me as if I was coming from Mars.

At XR events, you can try present and future XR gadgets and have a better understanding of the overall solution in the market and the future perspectives.

Me, happily trying Vitruvian VR at AWE Europe in Lisbon

I think that when you go to an important XR event (e.g. AWE US) and you try the latest hardware, you speak with people in private, maybe you also get some confidential information and try some future product under NDA, in a few days you get a better grasp of what is the real situation of the XR ecosystem.

On social media, there are many things people do not say publicly: for instance, on LinkedIn, we all brag about the success we are having, but we mostly hide the failures. Or there are some secret things that people do not trust writing in chats, but that feel more confident in telling you by voice because they leave no traces. I got to know a few industry secrets at XR events, of course, always keeping them for me if I was requested to do so.

Going to XR events is a good way to scout for information by speaking with the people who operate in the space. And this knowledge can be very useful for your job, especially if you work in XR, or in innovation in general.

Beautiful view of Qingdao (China) at night

When you travel, you see many different countries, and you discover wonderful new places, new types of food, and new cultures. This is amazing and it is personally enriching and worth the hassle of traveling alone. For instance, this year, on my last trip to Finland, I was also able to visit a bit of the Lapland, see a reindeer farm, speak with the people there, and learn how life is for them. I was also able to pet some reindeer like a Disney princess, and that was cool.

Me giving food to some reindeers. I have a new job I would like to do if I fail as a VR developer…

But it’s also true that not all business trips end with a true visit of the place where you go: I attended XRCC in Berlin, but I have seen nothing of Berling, if not the airport, my hostel, the LIDL supermarket, and the hotel venue. It is frustrating when you go to a place but you’ve not truly gone there.

Every trip is a surprise, and sometimes the unexpected happens. It may be good things, it may be bad things, but traveling it’s always adventurous.

Maud Clavier and I at SXSW 2022. No, it was not a BDSM party, but the MR concert by Miroshot

The craziest event experience I had was at SXSW in 2022: I started every day with a plan, which was respected for like 2 hours, and then just life happened and I was brought by people to other places, to chat, eat, or to party in a totally unexpected way. I literally woke up every day not knowing how I would have ended doing that day. But it was incredibly good: I had fun and I obtained remarkably work-related results, too!

Other times, the unexpected happens later. I remember interviewing an important person at a small event a few years ago and giving him my business card. I thought he was going to use it to even the legs of his table (it’s too thick for toilet paper), but actually like 3-4 years after he, out of the blue, wrote an email to me saying that he had been reading my blog this whole time and wanted to ask me a question about a thing. I was incredibly happy and surprised about this happening!

If you stay at home, unless aliens decide to enter your window, it’s hard that something unexpected happens (and when it happens, it’s always something negative like the toilet breaking and squirting shit everywhere). Go outside and see what happens!

A selfie with a giant chicken if for sure something I was not expecting to have this year!

Going to VR events is not all sunshine and roses: there are also many good reasons not to go and stay the whole time at home.

A nice dinner with VR people at AWE Europe 2024

As I’ve written in this (popular) article about AWE EU, the business problem of VR-specific events is that they are full of VR people. This is a great thing if you are looking for partnerships, or for friends, but it’s terrible if you are looking for customers.

Unless your customers are VR people (e.g. you sell an SDK, a VR headset, etc…), the other professionals in the field that you meet are mostly potential competitors that do a similar job to yours. I’m currently a VR consultant (hire me!) and It’s hard for me to start a collaboration with someone when I introduce myself by saying “Hey, I can develop XR applications” and the other person replies “Hey, I can develop XR applications, too!”.

Events that are hybrid and not only VR-related are better if you are looking for customers. Next year I will try to reduce a bit the VR-only events I’ll attend to make more room for more general tech events: in January, in fact, I’ll go to CES, which is one of the biggest tech events in the world.

Let’s be honest: XR is growing much slower than we all hope for. I’m not saying it is not growing: we had some moments over the years where the ecosystem made a big step forward, like the launch of the Quest 2 or Facebook’s renaming to Meta. But most of the time, it is a slow growth, and especially the last two years have been pretty static. This means that at XR events you mostly see always the same faces (mine included).

Don’t misunderstand me: they are amazing faces, people I love to meet and to spend my time with, but at the end of the day you keep meeting always the same people, which invalidates the initial mission of enlarging your network. Sometimes I have the impression that if I go to 10 XR events or 5 is mostly the same because the people I meet are always mostly the same.

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Traveling is fucking expensive. If I want to know new people from a specific company on Linkedin, I can invest one hour searching and sending some cold outreach messages, or asking someone for an introduction. Usually, I manage to obtain something this way, without even having to move from my desk. When I travel, I have instead to invest a lot of money and time to get the same connections.

My upcoming trip to CES is going to cost me, just for the plane tickets and the hotel, more than the average Italian monthly salary. And I’m going to stay in Vegas for just 4 days. Planes, hotels, food, gifts to buy for friends, dinners for networking… these are all big expenses. Intercontinental trips to the US or China are always going to cost me a few thousand dollars each, and this is big money to pay considering that most of the time I don’t come home directly with a signed contract that repays me for everything. Yes, the connections I get with people are much stronger than what I could obtain online, but they also cost me much more.

Traveling is very expensive… luckily sometimes you are repaid with amazing food, like it happened during XRCC (Image by XRCC)

Together with the money spent, I have also to consider the money I didn’t earn. As a consultant/developer I have a daily rate, but on the days I’m traveling, I can not earn money from my daily job, because (almost) the whole day is spent at the event or in activities collateral with it (e.g. writing articles on this blog about my experience). This exacerbates the money issues associated with traveling.

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Traveling is also incredibly stressful: waking up early to take a plane, having problems with transportation (e.g. strikes at airports), going to bed late at night because of the parties, jet lag due to timezone difference… these are all things that are going to add up and create stress to your body and mind. And if you do it too much, it can be a problem for your health.

Stress is another issue that influences my daily job: the 4-5 days after I come home from an intercontinental trip (e.g. from the US), even if I don’t have jet lag (I’m pretty good at handling it), my body is so tired that at 10 pm my eyes start to close and I have to go to sleep. This fatigue influences also my work performance, of course (which in turn impacts my earnings).

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Not all XR events are useful. Sure, you always bring something home from a trip and the attendance at an XR event: maybe you had a fun moment, a good chat, you made a new friend. It is impossible that you come back with literally zero positive outcomes. But sometimes these outcomes are very little or anyway not worth the hassle.

I remember at the beginning of my career, I was going to whatever place invited me to come and maybe be a speaker, and then after hours spent crafting a presentation, I found myself speaking in front of like 5 people. At the end of the day, I was very disappointed by what I obtained in exchange for the time I spent working on it. Sometimes going to events is not worth the time and money you invest by going there.

The fact is, going to events is like a lottery: you don’t know which one is a winning ticket. Many times you obtain nothing, most of the time you obtain some small wins, and rarely you have a big win. The problem is, you don’t know at which events you obtain the big wins, so you keep going to many of them, every time hoping it is the right one. Pareto would probably say that 20% of the events give you 80% of the results, which means that 80% of the time you may be unsatisfied with what you obtained.

I have a question for Pizza Hut: WHY???

As an Italian, seeing all those terrible pizzas around the world… with pineapple… with durian… with plastic cheese… it’s a trauma. Every time I see a bad pizza, I lose a year of my life (with all the trips of 2024, I’ll probably die before the end of this article). Traveling and seeing pizza profaned is one of the worst sides of going to XR events abroad.

Having a lovely BBQ dinner in Texas with fantastic people like Dean Takashi, Tom Emrich, Maud Clavier, Charlie Fink, and others!

After all this list of pros and cons, I guess you may be looking at the screen asking me “But so… should I attend XR events or not?”. Well, life is not black and white, so there is not a straight answer to give. It all depends on the utility you may have from them. I have listed the pros and the cons so that you can weigh them and make your decision for your specific case.

When you see an event, about XR or in general, you have first of all decide which is your goal of going there, then list both the costs you have to pay and the advantages you may get.

Having a clear goal is very important because you must know why you are undertaking so many disadvantages (stress, expenses, time lost, etc…). If you have a goal you can plan that event to fulfill your goal. If you do have not a clear goal, you probably won’t have any remarkable results, because you don’t know what you are looking for: if you are making a car trip without setting a destination on the navigator, you can’t arrive where you want to arrive. You may still decide you want to go anyway because the event is next-door to you and so you have very few disadvantages, or in that period you were bored at home and you wanted to do something, but don’t expect great results from your participation. You must have a purpose, whatever it is, and it should be important to you (the goal may even not necessarily be something business-oriented).

After you have understood your goal, you have to see if the pros are worth the cons. Imagine that you have the clear goal of meeting some people in the VR community that you have never met in person. Is it worth spending $500 to do that? Well, maybe. Is it worth spending $50,000 to do that? Probably not. But what if you spend $50,000 and then you are 99% sure you get $5M investments for your company? Then absolutely yes. What if the chances to get the investments are 50%. Then, maybe. Again, there is not a rule to follow, you have to evaluate your particular case, and make a mental list of the costs and the gains. And remember that the gains are not always certain: if you are a startup looking for money, you can be sure you speak with investors at an event, but you are not sure they are going to give you money.

When we are invited to an event, there is always the initial excitement at the idea of a trip, a new adventure. But we should be very practical, and decide if it is worth going or not in a practical way, not by being driven by emotions. Otherwise, we risk just spending a lot of money and time in fun but useless activities. This year, I decided to do more trips also because not having a very demanding job like the last year, I had more time to dedicate to traveling and to enlarge my network. If next year, as I hope, I will have more work to do, I won’t be able to afford to travel this much, because my time will be more precious, and every day spent not working may have a significant impact on my business goals. So I will probably be more selective in the events I’ll attend in the second half of 2025.

At the end of the day, if you still want a piece of advice on the question about going or not, my suggestion is to go every year to some XR events, because going there you will have a very hands-on look at the status of XR and also meet the amazing people of our community, and have fun. But be very practical and selective about which events to attend. Unless your job is to be a speaker at events, select a few key events that may bring you the best advantages and go there.

And if you want a piece of advice about an XR event you must go to, I would absolutely say AWE US. It’s the biggest and most complete event out there, and next year it is also going to expand even more.

Beps Day 2014 has probably been the first event I have been a speaker at (Thank Beppe and Gianni for this 🙂 )

You may also be wondering what is my balance for the year after the many trips I had. Well, honestly speaking, I think that, overall, I obtained from my trips to VR events less than I hoped for, and less than I invested in. Business-wise, it has been pretty bad. Connection-wise, it has been ok. Hardware-tests-wise, it has been very good. For my personal growth, it has been awesome. That’s why I suggest you be selective about where you are going. And that’s why, as I have said, next year I want to change strategy and mix VR-only events (like AWE US) with more general startup-related events (like Slush) and tech-related events (like CES). Of course, I will update you in case this strategy pays off.

But still, notwithstanding my disappointment, I had a couple of key encounters that I’m sure will positively influence my professional and also personal life in the upcoming years. And these alone, may have been worth the effort.

PS Thank you, to all of you that made my time at VR events so wonderful.

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This article was originally published on skarredghost.com