Qualcomm immediately introduced Snapdragon AR2, its “purpose-built headworn augmented actuality platform.” Differentiating from the corporate’s current Snapdragon XR2 chips, Qualcomm says the AR2 structure is best suited to creating AR glasses with low energy consumption and compact kind components.
At the moment throughout Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit occasion, the corporate revealed the Snapdragon AR2 platform which consists of a trio of chips which the corporate says will assist make actually glasses-sized AR gadgets attainable.
Qualcomm was early to the standalone VR house and has been dominant with its Snapdragon XR2 chips which have discovered their manner into lots of the main standalone headsets in the marketplace, and at the moment are in additional than 60 gadgets whole, the corporate says.
Aiming to take an analogous chew out of the forthcoming AR glasses section, Qualcomm has created a brand new Snapdragon AR2 platform with a distributed processing design. The platform consists of three chips:
- AR processor (for sensor notion and video output)
- AR co-processor (for sensor fusion and devoted pc imaginative and prescient duties)
- Wi-Fi 7 chip (for communication to a number processing system)
By making a extra distributed workload throughout a essential processor and a co-processor, Qualcomm claims AR2 is as much as 50% extra energy environment friendly whereas providing 2.5 instances higher AI efficiency, and a extra compact form-factor, in comparison with the single-chip Snapdragon XR2 answer.
Not solely will the AR processor and co-processor assist share a workload, Qualcomm additionally sees AR2 gadgets utilizing the speedy Wi-Fi 7 chip to speak with a number system like a smartphone or wi-fi compute puck that may do the heavy lifting like utility processing and rendering. Qualcomm claims the Wi-Fi 7 chip (FastConnect 7800) can obtain 5.8 Gbps bandwidth with simply 2ms of latency.
Utilizing this three-chip framework for distributed processing, Qualcomm claims it will likely be attainable to construct compact AR glasses that devour lower than one watt of energy.
The AR2 platform helps as much as 9 concurrent cameras for a bevy of head-tracking, environment-sensing, and user-tracking duties.
“We constructed Snapdragon AR2 to handle the distinctive challenges of headworn AR and supply trade main processing, AI and connectivity that may match inside a trendy kind issue,” mentioned Hugo Swart, vice chairman of XR product administration at Qualcomm. “With the technical and bodily necessities for VR/MR and AR diverging, Snapdragon AR2 represents one other metaverse-defining platform in our XR portfolio to assist our OEM companions revolutionize AR glasses.”
There’s no phrase but on when the primary AR2 gadgets will hit the market, however Qualcomm lists a handful of companions actively working with the platform: Lenovo, LG, Niantic, Nreal, Oppo, Pico, Qonoq, Rokid, Sharp, TCL, Vuzix, and Xiaomi.