Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Qualcomm officially launched two platforms for XR devices on September 28, namely the second-generation Snapdragon XR2 platform and the first-generation Snapdragon AR1 platform. Among them, the second generation Snapdragon XR2 platform is built to enable a better VR and MR experience, while the first generation Snapdragon AR1 platform is specially built for the next generation of smart glasses.

Today, the development momentum of VR and MR is very strong, consumer applications such as games, fitness, entertainment and other consumer applications are constantly developing, and training, education, medical and other applications have emerged in the enterprise market. In the AR world, consumer-oriented immersive experiences are also gaining momentum, and a large number of enterprises are already using rich AR applications, including remote assistance, instructions / guidance, and productivity tools empowered by AR smart glasses.

The two XR platform products released by Qualcomm will be able to empower all areas of XR, including fully immersed digital virtual reality, hybrid reality with seamless integration of physical and digital worlds, and augmented reality that overlays virtual content in physical space.

Let's take a specific look at these two products.

The second-generation Snapdragon XR2 platform has three advantages to create immersive experience. Compared with the previous generation products, the second-generation Snapdragon XR2 platform has greatly improved performance. It is equipped with a single-chip architecture with double optimization of energy efficiency and performance, without the need for external battery packs, and can help OEM manufacturers to build high-performance and affordable devices.

Generally speaking, its advantages mainly include the following three aspects:

Breakthrough immersive experience for vision, graphics, and multimedia

Smooth interaction and more immersive interaction experience can make the virtual world and the physical world blend perfectly.

By improving the ability of video perspective, it can mix reality.

1. The immersive experience is first of all the immersive experience. The GPU of the second generation Snapdragon XR2 is 2.5 times higher than that of the previous generation, showing amazing graphic effects and excellent colors and details. And 50% power consumption can be saved under the same visual effects.

The second generation Snapdragon XR2 also optimizes the 3K × 3K display, which is the ideal solution for current VR and MR devices. At the same time, the platform supports many of the latest advanced features, such as space warps, game super resolution and visual focus rendering.

Of course, some friends may have noticed that there are already many Micro OLED micro-displays with a resolution of 4K on the market.

Qualcomm believes that the key to this point is technology maturity. At present, 4K display is still an expensive solution and does not have sufficient supply capacity to achieve large-scale expansion. The 3K × 3K resolution has been able to bring excellent visual effects, has a great advantage over the existing solutions on the market, and can create a satisfactory user experience at an affordable price.

2. Smooth interaction while in terms of smooth interaction, the second generation Snapdragon XR2 supports excellent concurrency awareness technology to achieve understanding of the environment and users.

What does this mean? To put it simply, if XR wants to achieve the integration of real digital space and physical space, it must have a precise understanding of the user's environment, such as the location of the floor and walls, what items are in the room, and so on. At the same time, we also need to have a full understanding of the user himself for head tracking, eye tracking, gesture tracking, and whole body movement tracking and so on.

These technologies require a lot of computing power in the process of operation, so the second generation Snapdragon XR2 greatly enhances the ability of AI computing, and its terminal side AI capability is up to 8 times higher than that of the first generation Snapdragon XR2 platform. Support INT8, and optimize the connection between different AI modules to achieve tight collaborative processing, while expanding the memory on the terminal side.

In addition, the second generation Snapdragon XR2 platform has also greatly upgraded the computer vision module, putting the feature detection and tracking (Feature detection and tracking) function in 6DoF into the hardware vision analysis engine at the chip level, thus improving performance and reducing power consumption and delay.

Connection technology is also critical in seamless and smooth interaction. The second generation Snapdragon XR2 supports Wi-Fi 7 and Wi-Fi 6e connections, as well as Qualcomm FastConnect software suite for XR, which can achieve a 25% reduction in power consumption, a peak speed of 5.8Gbps, and an 80% reduction in latency.

3. Mixed reality is followed by the enabling of mixed reality by the second generation Snapdragon XR2. In hybrid reality, the display world is transmitted to the head display screen in real time through an external camera and is kept at a very low level when video perspective is required, resulting in an excellent user experience.

The second generation Snapdragon XR2 optimizes the entire video perspective thread to achieve a video perspective delay as low as 12ms. At the same time, Qualcomm also improves the image quality of video perspective through geometric correction, noise reduction, dynamic brightness adjustment and other technologies.

Generally speaking, the second-generation Snapdragon XR2 platform will bring a new level of experience to the XR market. Meta Quest 3, which is launched with the second-generation Snapdragon XR2 platform, has been released at the same time, and you will soon feel the XR experience driven by this super platform.

The first generation Snapdragon AR1 platform promotes the further popularization of smart glasses products the new first generation Snapdragon AR1 platform is specially built for the next generation of smart glasses. Qualcomm has been promoting the development of immersive AR smart glasses for some time, and has achieved good results. They have already launched the first generation of Snapdragon AR2, a dedicated platform for immersive AR glasses, which supports 6DoF, distributed processing and many other features.

The key feature of the first-generation Snapdragon AR1 platform is shooting, which uses 14-bit dual ISP to support the top real-time shooting experience, while combining many top features on smartphones, such as automatic exposure, automatic face detection, computational HDR and portrait mode. In this way, the smart glasses empowered by the first generation of Snapdragon AR1 will change the way people take photos and videos, and people can free their hands to shoot.

In order to deeply optimize the shooting effect, the first generation Snapdragon AR1 platform also enhanced the AI capability, which is essential for smart glasses, which can help enhance the shooting quality of photos and videos, achieve clearer calls through noise reduction, and achieve clearer video shooting through computer vision.

Moreover, these operations can be done at the end of the glasses without the need for a mobile phone. Yes, Qualcomm said that the features supported by the first Snapdragon AR1 are relatively simple, so all processing can be done on the glasses side, requiring more complex links only when users need to upload information from their glasses to a smartphone or cloud, but this does not involve operating smart glasses with a mobile phone, just a simple Wi-Fi connection to connect the smart glasses to the smartphone.

At the same time, the first generation of Snapdragon AR1 platform adds visual search function and health sensors for health and movement, so that smart glasses can bring AR experience to users and provide practical situational information and instructions. In addition, using voice commands to interact with smart glasses frees your hands, which can be very useful in skateboarding, cycling, cooking, and so on.

The first-generation Snapdragon AR1 is an extensible platform that provides flexibility for OEM vendors by supporting a variety of different configurations, including:

Smart glasses with excellent camera and music functions, with image shooting as the core.

Smart glasses that support monocular display, perfect support for reminder notifications and navigation applications

And more powerful smart glasses that support binocular display and have richer visual effects.

The virtual assistant in the smart glasses can respond to the user's instructions and provide situational information in front of the user's eyes. In addition, the first generation of Snapdragon AR1 can also support more use cases, such as the ability to provide users with richer information through visual search on the street or in shopping malls, real-time translation, goods picking and navigation.

In terms of connection, the first generation Snapdragon AR1 platform is equipped with Qualcomm FastConnect software suite based on XR, and the first generation Snapdragon AR1 can achieve real-time video streaming and music streaming, and free hands.

Overall, the first-generation Snapdragon AR1 platform supports top-of-the-line photo and video shooting capabilities, has powerful glasses-side AI capabilities, enhances the photo and video shooting experience, supports virtual assistants to free hands, and supports multiple types of smart glasses. Qualcomm said that the Ray-Ban Meta series will launch the first generation of Snapdragon AR1 platform. Based on the Snapdragon AR1 platform, the Ray-Ban glasses are so lightweight and stylish that they look like ordinary sunglasses.

It is concluded that Qualcomm has more than a decade of research and development of XR cutting-edge technology, while the second generation Snapdragon XR2 platform and the first generation Snapdragon AR1 platform integrate Qualcomm's leading mobile processing technology. I believe that with the release of these two platforms and subsequent applications in terminal products, we will get a more immersive XR experience and promote further changes in spatial computing. Lay a solid foundation for the deep integration of the real world and the digital world.

In addition to continuously launching dedicated chip platforms tailored to the XR market, Qualcomm is also growing and developing the ecology of XR, such as providing underlying core interaction technology support for XR ecology in terms of software and algorithms, and providing services to start-ups and developers of the XR industry through the XR ecosystem.

In addition, Qualcomm also provides reference designs based on the XR platform for different types of terminals to help terminal manufacturers accelerate the transformation of technology into products by providing overall solutions for software and hardware. Qualcomm's partners have released more than 80 devices based on Snapdragon's XR and AR platforms. The technology supported by Snapdragon not only empowers the leading enterprises in Meta, Lenovo, PICO and other industries, but also provides support for start-ups, including many domestic enterprises, which effectively promotes the innovation and development of the whole XR industry chain.

XR, together with 5G and AI, are the three basic technologies that constitute the vision of the future meta-universe, and based on Snapdragon XR platform, Qualcomm is promoting the transformation of computing from two-dimensional display to spatial computing, coupled with their strong technological advantages of artificial intelligence on the 5G and terminal side, Qualcomm's mobile technology is becoming the key to meta-universe, and the door to a new era will eventually be opened.

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