Category: qualcomm snapdragon xr2

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DigiLens Unveils New XR Smartglasses, the Snapdragon XR2 Powered Visualize Design v1

DigiLens Design v1

Specialising in holographic waveguides for the past 18 years, DigiLens should know a thing or two about making smartglasses. Today, the company has announced its latest product, the Visualize Design v1, a modular pair of XR smartglasses due to arrive in early summer.

DigiLens Design v1

The first product from DigiLens’ Visualize Framework, the Design v1 integrates Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon XR2 Platform as well as DigiLens’ Crystal50 waveguides. These provide a waveguide efficiency of over 325 nits/lumen with 80% transparency, and a 50-degree (diagonal) field-of-view (FOV). DigiLens also claims the Crystal50 features “four-times less eye glow than the optics in HoloLens 2.” The hardware also features 6GB RAM, WiFi, Bluetooth, stereo speakers for spatial audio, an 8MP RGB camera, two cameras for 6DoF tracking, and multiple microphones for noise cancellation and user input.

While the Visualize Design v1 can be used as-is, just like Qualcomm’s XR1 AR Smart Viewer Reference Design the smartglasses are more of a springboard hardware platform to help developers, OEMs and IoT companies accelerate commercialisation. So the design is entirely modular, enabling partners to create smaller, more specialised form factors using the Visualize Framework. This also means as DigiLens refines its waveguides new ones can easily be attached to the platform.

“Design v1 is brighter, lighter and more capable than any other waveguide based XR device on the market. Our strategy is to empower the forward leaning XR companies in the ecosystem to capitalize on the strengths of an emerging horizontal market,” said Chris Pickett, CEO of DigiLens in a statement. “We are creating an XR blueprint for the ecosystem to take, add to and adapt as needed for their individual markets and their unique XR software development needs. Expanding the pool of ex­perts and democratizing ideas across the spectrum is what the market has missed to date.”

DigiLens Design v1

“Design v1 promises to be an excellent platform to offer our clients cost-effective headworn devices with greater comfort and more processing power, ideally adapted to their use case. We are looking forward to start leveraging the benefits of Design v1 for our XpertEye remote assistance solution and continue to create value and amazing experiences for our customers,” adds Christian Guillemot, CEO of AMA.

The DigiLens Visualise Design v1 has already started to ship to select partners with the wider rollout starting at the end of June 2021. For further updates on the latest XR smartglasses, keep reading VRFocus.

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Influx of Qualcomm XR2 Powered 5G XR Viewers are Coming

Qualcomm

Technology isn’t quite there yet when it comes to a stylish pair of sunglasses which have virtual or augmented reality (VR/AR) tech built-in, but steps towards that end goal are being made. Today, Qualcomm has unveiled a selection of ‘XR Viewers’ which use its XR2 5G platform slated to arrive in the next 12 months.

Qualcomm - XR Viewers

Some of these have already been seen before, most notably the Nreal Light and the Panasonic UHD VR Eyeglasses which appeared during CES 2020 in January and XRSpace. What all of these represent is an immersive ecosystem of companies from smartphone makers to global telecommunications operators looking to drive a new category of headsets which are consumer-friendly.

All the XR Viewers are designed to tether to the latest 5G-capable smartphones powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 or 865 processors, thus providing quality XR content via 5G’s high bandwidth and low latency technology. Currently, XR viewer manufacturers include 3Glasses, iQIYI, Nreal, OPPO, Panasonic, Pico and Shadow Creator, while smartphone OEM’s who are participating are ASUS, BlackShark, OnePlus, OPPO, Smartisan, vivo and ZTE.

While devices like Nreal Light are slated for a 2020 release, Qualcomm expects most of these to arrive within a year, although some will likely be specific to certain markets like China. To ensure seamless connections for a consumer-friendly experience, Qualcomm’s XR Optimized Certification Program tests performance and validates compatibility between both devices, looking at head tracking, power, thermal, motion to photon latency and other variables.

Nreal

“With the support of Qualcomm Technologies, we plan to optimize these VR glasses to work seamlessly with 5G-enabled smartphones,” said Michiko Ogawa, CTO, Appliances Company, Panasonic Corporation. “With a combination of 5G connectivity and compact, lightweight, ultra-high image quality VR glasses, we hope to deliver highly immersive experiences for live music & sports events in 2021 and beyond.”

At the same time Qualcomm has laid out its expectations for the future of this sector, envisioning that the tether will disappear within the next four years; devices wirelessly connecting to phones. While a full 5G standalone headset is somewhere between 5-10 years away.

As development continues and the XR Viewers come to market, VRFocus will bring you further updates.

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Qualcomm Unveils Snapdragon XR2 5G Reference Design Headset

Last year Qualcomm Technologies revealed its new Snapdragon XR2 platform design with 5G and the next generation of augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) devices in mind. Today, the company has taken that process by unveiling the first reference design.

Qualcomm

As with any reference design, the idea is to help foster new products using the XR2 5G platform, with OEM’s able to make use of the extra power and functionality it offers. The designs cover all three technologies from a sleek looking, matt black VR headset to an MR device similar to Microsoft’s HoloLens. All the form factor were developed by Goertek.

As previously released the Snapdragon XR2 5G features a range of improvements on the previous generation. Qualcomm states that the reference design has 2x the CPU and GPU performance, 4x more video bandwidth, 6x higher resolution and 11x AI improvement. The platform can support up to 7 seven cameras, two internal, one for each eye for eye-tracking and four external cameras, two RGB cameras for MR experiences and two for head tracking. Manufacturers can use the reference design to assemble different configurations enlisting the seventh camera for facial/lip tracking or a second monochrome camera for controller tracking.

As Oculus Quest has proven customers want easy to use, wireless devices and 5G is expected to take that to the next stage. Headsets using Snapdragon XR2 5G shouldn’t need to worry about heavy onboard processing, limiting the quality of applications due to chip limitations. Qualcomm’s Boundless XR is an end-to-end solution using Edge Cloud rendering over 5G – the concept was previously shown in partnership with Zerolight – allowing some of the work to be offloaded to the cloud before returning to the headset, only possible using 5G’s low latency. The reference design can use Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) via a 5G connection, or on a nearby PC using a 60-GHz wireless connection.

Qualcomm - Zerolight

Other useful features of the reference design include an IR emitter for hand tracking and head tracking, allowing for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) to coexist. It supports 3D audio, voice commands and 2Kx2K per eye dual panel LCD.

When it comes to when these new devices using Snapdragon XR2 5G will start appearing Hugo Swart, VP & GM of XR at Qualcomm said in a press briefing that: “We expect that this year, to have XR2-based products. I think the question is really will the first devices have 5G or not, I still cannot answer that but I’m confident that we’re going to see XR2-based products in the market this year.”

So 2020 could see some exciting standalone hardware arrive by the end of the year with the help of 5G. For further updates from Qualcomm, keep reading VRFocus.

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Qualcomm Reveals New Reference Designs for XR2-powered VR & AR Headsets

Qualcomm today revealed new reference designs for VR and AR headsets powered by its new Snapdragon XR2 chip. Complete with hand-tracking, magnetic controller tracking, eye-tracking, and more, the Qualcomm reference designs are a glimpse of what’s to come in AR and VR over the next year or two.

Qualcomm has been a quiet enabler of most major standalone AR and VR headsets on the market today. The company has its Snapdragon chips in more than 30 headsets—including major devices like Oculus Quest, Oculus Go, HoloLens 2, and Vive Focus—and it has its fingerprints on many of these headsets through the fruits of its HMD Accelerator Program which provides reference designs that act as blueprints for companies to quickly bring VR and AR headsets to market.

Today the company revealed its latest VR and AR headset reference designs which now include the company’s powerful new Snapdragon XR2 chip. The reference designs give us a clear idea of the specs and capabilities of standalone headsets that we’re likely to see over the next year or two.

The working XR2 reference design, also known as the VRDK, is a larger headset which serves as a testbed for partners to evaluate different features and capabilities. It’s bulky and quite basic looking, for ease of production, but crammed with features for testing.

Late last year Qualcomm gave us a good idea of the kind of specs and features we could expect to see from VR headsets based on XR2; namely: displays up to 3K × 3K per eye @ 90Hz, integrated 5G connectivity, support for seven simultaneous camera feeds, and significantly more processing power across the board compared to Snapdragon 835 (one of the most common chipsets found in current standalone headsets, including Quest).

Image courtesy Qualcomm

The company added today that the XR2 reference design can support controllerless hand-tracking (likely from Ultraleap), Atraxa magnetic controller tracking, and Tobii eye-tracking. While no one headset is likely to include everything, the features exist in the reference design for partners to evaluate and consider for inclusion in future headsets.

Qualcomm also showed off prototype industrial design references (one for VR and one for AR) which offer a glimpse of the kind of form-factors the company believes could be achieved for commercial products based on the XR2 reference design.

1 of 2

Qualcomm is also touting a “comprehensive, end-to-end solution” for cloud-rendered VR delivered over a 5G network. While the company had spoken about the possibility of cloud VR before, this is the first time it’s telling partners that it has all the pieces in place for anyone who wants to attempt to deliver a product built around the concept. Even if it all works in theory, such a device won’t really be feasible until 5G networks and (more importantly) EDGE computing are widely deployed.

The post Qualcomm Reveals New Reference Designs for XR2-powered VR & AR Headsets appeared first on Road to VR.

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Qualcomm Chips Now in More Than 30 Headsets, First XR2 Devices Expected in 2H 2020

Qualcomm has been using its heft as a mobile chip maker to accelerate the development of AR and VR devices because it believes the ‘immersive compute’ category is the long term future of the smartphone. It’s still early days, but with more than 30 headsets with Qualcomm chips now on the market, the company has become the key enabler of mobile XR devices. With the recent launch of Snapdragon XR2, its latest and greatest made-for-XR chipset, the company has further expanded its commitment to the sector.

Speaking with Road to VR at CES 2020 this week, Qualcomm’s Head of XR, Hugo Swart, said that the company’s mobile Snapdragon chipsets are now in more than 30 AR and VR headsets, including leading standalone headsets like Oculus Quest, Go, Vive Focus, and HoloLens 2.

Image courtesy Qualcomm

Chip makers like Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD have largely left the door open for Qualcomm to dominate the mobile portion of the XR space.

Intel was actually quite ahead of its time when it showed off one of the first standalone VR headset reference designs, codenamed Alloy, back in mid-2016. The company intended to work with partners to bring products based on Alloy to market, but Intel cancelled the project in 2017 due to what it said was a lack of partner interest. Intel also supplied the processor in the first HoloLens, but Microsoft made a decisive jump to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon for HoloLens 2.

Nvidia’s graphical prowess seems especially well suited for the needs of XR, which is deeply dependent on high performance real-time graphics. Indeed, on the PC side of the market, Nvidia GPUs absolutely dominate the VR landscape. In early 2018, Oculus reported that a staggering 92% of its Rift users were using Nvidia GPUs, an even greater dominance over AMD than in the general PC gaming space. But in the mobile XR space, Nvidia only has its chips in one major headset: Magic Leap.

Like Intel, AMD was eager about standalone VR early on. After acquiring a startup which was working on the concept, AMD revealed the Sulon Q, a standalone VR headset, powered by AMD, and also designed for pass-through AR. While Sulon Q was said to launch in late 2016, it was quietly cancelled and forgotten.

Qualcomm, on the other hand, has stuck it out. The company has sought to help interested partners rapidly bring XR devices to market by supplying Virtual Reality Development Kits (VRDK) and pairing companies with partner solutions and capable manufacturers.

Following the release of its first dedicated AR and VR chipset in 2018, Snapdragon XR1, Qualcomm doubled down with Snapdragon XR2, its first chip dedicated to the needs of high-end XR devices, and the first such chip to offer 5G. At CES 2020 this week, Qualcomm clarified that, while it had introduced the XR2 as the ‘XR2 5G’, the 5G radio is an optional component of the chipset.

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Snapdragon XR2 Chip to Enable Standalone Headsets with 3K×3K Resolution & 7 Cameras

The company also hinted that it will reveal a new VRDK reference design based on XR2 in the near future, likely at Mobile World Congress next month. Unlike the smartphone landscape, which tends to adopt new computing platforms year after year, Qualcomm’s Head of XR, Hugo Swart, said he expects XR2 to be a viable option for XR devices for several years.

Qualcomm also says that it expects the first real devices based on XR2 to hit the market in the second half of 2020.

This may or may not be related the collaboration that Qualcomm announced last month with Niantic, the creator of Pokemon Go; together the companies have committed to a “multi-year joint collaboration on an integrated design spanning AR glasses reference hardware, software, and cloud-components.”

The post Qualcomm Chips Now in More Than 30 Headsets, First XR2 Devices Expected in 2H 2020 appeared first on Road to VR.

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Snapdragon XR2 Chip to Enable Standalone Headsets with 3K×3K Resolution & 7 Cameras

Qualcomm today announced Snapdragon XR2 5G, its latest chipset platform dedicated to the needs of standalone VR and AR headsets. The new platform is aimed at high-end devices with support for 3K × 3K displays at 90Hz, along with integrated 5G, accelerated AI processing, and up to seven simultaneous camera feeds for user and environment tracking.

Qualcomm is the name when it comes to the guts which power standalone AR and VR headsets. The company’s chipset can be found in leading standalone headsets like Oculus Quest, Go, Vive Focus, HoloLens 2, Lenovo Mirage Solo, and plenty more.

For the most part, these devices have adopted chipsets that were originally designed for smartphones, but in 2018 Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon XR1, it’s first chipset specially made for AR and VR headsets.

Image courtesy Qualcomm

Today the company is introducing the latest iteration of that chipset, the Snapdragon XR2 5G. While XR1 was made for low-end devices, XR2 5G targets high-end standalone headsets, making it a candidate for Oculus Quest 2, Magic Leap 2, and similar next-gen devices.

XR2 offers up notable improvements over Snapdragon 835 (one of the most common chipsets found in current standalone headsets, including Quest); Qualcomm claims 2x performance in CPU & GPU, 4x increase in pixel throughput for video playback, and up to 6x resolution per-eye compared to Snapdragon 835—supporting up to 3K × 3K displays at 90Hz.

Image courtesy Qualcomm

That’s all pretty much par for the course in terms of the kinds of improvements you’d like to see from one generation of chipset to the next, but with XR2, Qualcomm is increasingly tuning the platform for the needs of AR and VR headsets specifically.

Notably, XR2 supports up to seven simultaneous camera feeds (up from four in prior platforms). This is key for advanced tracking, both of the environment and the user. Oculus Quest, for instance, uses four cameras to track the position of the headset and controllers. The option for three additional camera feeds opens the door to additional cameras for eye, mouth, or even leg tracking. And let’s not forget the host of benefits that eye-tracking can unlock.

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Eye-tracking is a Game Changer for VR That Goes Far Beyond Foveated Rendering

Qualcomm also says that XR2 offers low-latency pass-through video which could improve the pass-through video experience on headsets like Quest, and potentially enable a wider range of pass-through AR use-cases.

Additionally XR2 boasts significantly accelerated AI processing; 11x compared to Snapdragon 835, which could greatly benefit the sort of operations used for turning incoming video feeds into useful tracking information.

And then there’s integrated 5G. While 5G may not be the essential ingredient to an XR future that the hype would have you believe, it means that future devices can include a high bandwidth, low-latency connection built right in. This would be especially useful for any AR devices expected to be worn outside of the home.

Qualcomm Remains Bullish on XR Heading into 2020

Image courtesy Qualcomm

Credit where credit is due: Qualcomm identified the XR segment early on as something worth investing in, and they’ve kept at it. With the announcement of XR2, it’s clear that Qualcomm believes that XR is destined to become a huge market and the company aims to play a major role in it.

“Competitors are not coming close to our commitment in XR,” said Hugo Swart, Qualcomm’s VP of XR, in a briefing call with Road to VR.

In Q1 2020, Qualcomm plans to introduce the latest version of their XR reference headset based on XR2, which the company offers up as a blueprint for headset makers through its HMD Accelerator Program. Qualcomm expects that the first commercial headsets to launch with XR2 will come in the second half of 2020.

Algonside XR2, Qualcomm plans to continue to offer the existing XR1 chipset to cover lower-end XR headsets.

The post Snapdragon XR2 Chip to Enable Standalone Headsets with 3K×3K Resolution & 7 Cameras appeared first on Road to VR.