Yesterday on the Snapdragon Summit, Hugo Swart, Vice President, XR Product Management, Qualcomm, unveiled the Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1, a {hardware} platform fabricated from three chips that can energy the next-gen augmented actuality glasses.

The new Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1 is the newest addition to Qualcomm’s extended reality (XR) product line.

The system is fabricated from an AR processor, situated inside the correct arm of the glasses, an AR co-processor situated on the entrance within the center, proper behind the digital camera module, and a Qualcomm QuickConnect 7800 connectivity chip situated contained in the left temple.

For as soon as, Qualcomm didn’t combine all of the chips in a single massive SoC however has cut up the {hardware} into three small packages to assist OEMs ship skinny and light-weight designs for his or her next-gen AR glasses.

To allow the slim type issue, the Snapdragon AR2 distributes the processing workload between the glasses and a Snapdragon-powered smartphone, PC, or different suitable host units.

According to the chip maker, the principle processor occupies a 40% smaller PCB space on glass in comparison with the Wireless AR Smart Viewer Reference Design powered by Snapdragon XR2.

The AR2 platform achieves a 50% enhance in AI efficiency whereas consuming 50% much less energy than the earlier era. Qualcomm designed the AR2 to energy glasses that can compute utilizing lower than 1W.

The AR processor, optimized for low motion-to-photon latency (sub-9ms), helps as much as 9 cameras for scanning the atmosphere and for the consumer.

The AR processor includes a {hardware} acceleration engine for higher consumer movement monitoring and localization, and an AI accelerator to scale back latency for enter interactions corresponding to hand monitoring or 6DoF. Finally, the chip manages the show output.

The AR co-processor aggregates digital camera and sensor knowledge and options eye-tracking for foveated rendering, to optimize graphics rendering efficiency. Additionally, the computing unit delivers iris authentication.

The connectivity chip relies on Qualcomm FastConnect 7800, a connectivity system that helps Wi-Fi 7. Thanks to this tiny connectivity chip, OEMs will be capable of ship sub-2ms latency between the AR glasses and the smartphone host gadget. Qualcomm offers the QuickConnect XR Software Suite 2.0, to assist builders higher management the XR knowledge, scale back latency and jitter, and stop interference.

Qualcomm affords the Snapdragon Spaces XR Developer Platform, an OpenXR SDK tailor-made to Qualcomm XR merchandise that gives generally wanted software program capabilities that the majority XR apps require.

Since Snapdragon Spaces adheres to the open-source specs, the AR2 system of three chips may additionally work with a non-Snapdragon telephone or cellular gadget. We can safely assume that Snapdragon Spaces works optimally with the newest Snapdragon cellular units.

History of Qualcomm XR platforms:

Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 1, Qualcomm’s newest chipset for VR headsets, combines Mixed Reality (MR) and Virtual actuality (VR), launched on October 11, 2022, and powers the Meta Quest Pro announced at Meta Connect 2022. The XR2 Plus delivers 50% greater sustained energy and 30% improved thermal efficiency over its predecessor.

Snapdragon XR2 5G (XR2 Gen 1) launched on December 4, 2019, an XR platform that powers, amongst different units, the Lynx R-1 Mixed Reality (MR) headset, and the Wireless AR Smart Viewer reference design.

Snapdragon XR1 launched in May 2018 that powers the Lenovo AssumeReality A3 sensible glasses launched at CES 2021.

Filed in Cellphones. Read extra about Android, Augmented Reality (AR), Qualcomm, Snapdragon and Snapdragon Summit.