Getting your
Trinity Audioplayer ready...Qualcomm made the case that the next computer you own won’t sit in your pocket. It’ll sit on your face.
The San Diego chip maker took the stage at the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach on Tuesday to unveil the Snapdragon Reality Elite, a chip that will power augmented reality and mixed reality devices.
Though augmented reality glasses have existed for over a decade, Qualcomm’s new chip is a significant improvement, executives say. By integrating artificial intelligence into everyday glasses, the device has the potential to be smarter than your cell phone.
The San Diego chip maker says its new Snapdragon Reality Elite chip significantly boosts XR performance over its last flagship, with 60% better graphics, 30% faster CPU speeds and 160% more AI processing power.
Powered by Qualcomm’s chips, the new glasses — brought to market by Ray-Ban, Snapchat and, soon, global glasses brand Inspecs — can do almost everything you may want to do on your phone: play music, give you directions, and even order a package from Amazon by simple dictation. No need to pull out your phone or laboriously tap, tech executives explained on stage.
“They see what you see and hear what you hear,” said Nima Shams, senior director of XR product management on stage Tuesday.
The large language model running on a phone can provide personalized responses according to a knowledge base that centralizes personal information, habits, and more, giving the users the most “exciting, intuitive, and personalized experiences,” said Shams.
Qualcomm has a near monopoly on powering this wearable technology, and has been here since the beginning said Ori Inbar, founder of AWE XR, which is hosting its 17th conference.
All day, the San Diego tech executives showed splashy videos of people wearing AR glasses powered with their chips, describing a world where people play, work and get help without looking down at a screen.
But even with the improvements, the AR space remains far from widespread adoption.
It may be easier to land on Mars than to commercialize augmented reality glasses, said Charlie Fink, producer of the AIXR Podcast. Not only is it difficult to cram desktop computing into glasses that are wearable — stylistically and comfortably (high compute can get physically hot) — but delivering them at a respectable price point is nearly impossible.
But with Qualcomm’s new tech and partnerships with XREAL, Android, Google and Snapchat, the consumer market is closer.
Qualcomm launched the Scalable Turnkey AI-Ready Toolkit (START) program to help jumpstart commercialization, offering a handful of white-label AI models it will license to makers of AR glasses.
“The brands know how to make things beautiful, we know how to make things smart,” said Shams, “And so we’re taking all of that complexity away to allow the brands to do that.”
Shams announced that global glasses brand Inspecs was the first partner. The company represents 22 brands, including O’Neill and Caterpillar.
Qualcomm is also powering the newest iteration of Snapchat Spectacles, which first debuted in 2016 to a wary audience.
“The next generation of Specs is a very different kind of computer,” said Evan Spiegel, co-founder and CEO of Snapchat, during his keynote speech to several hundred people Tuesday. “It’s light enough to wear, powerful enough to understand the world, fast enough to make digital objects feel real and natural enough to get out of the way.”
The glasses retail for $2,195 and will ship this fall.