Most new consumer tech products enter the market with high-priced devices geared toward “early adopters” who are willing to pay for the privilege of exploring their new features before everybody else. Personal computers, mobile phones, flat-screen TVs: The first products were reserved for the rich. And what they got, often, was technology still suffering teething pains.
Spatial Computing, and this new era of Extended Reality (XR) is about to leap past that early-adopter point. It is a transformational technology that will take, entertainment, productivity, gaming from 2D rectangular screens to computing in “space” – where the the world becomes the digital canvas. It is beginning to change how people interact with technology and with each other. Our mission at Qualcomm, for the past decade, has been to make building and experiencing XR affordable, accessible and open to any device manufacturer from start-ups to top global brands. To make this a reality we must also enable developers, and to make sure that there’s an open XR ecosystem that benefits from a competitive market. Just like access to the Internet itself, we believe XR or Spatial Computing should be for everybody and not dictated by one single company.
There are two primary keys to bringing XR to market quickly and keeping it affordable: hardware that meets minimum requirements for immersiveness and a robust software market.
1. Affordable and Reasonable hardware specs
Every technology vendor today benefits from the smartphone era because of the ongoing R&D that goes into building smartphone chips. The continuous investment and innovation to offer high performance in small size and low power, and the global capacity to produce them, makes smartphone-level technology affordable for more than just smartphones. The technology today lives in appliances, cars, TVs, a variety of consumer electronics, robots, and more.
A similar dynamic has been playing out for years in XR. Qualcomm Technologies, in parallel to its development of smartphone processors, has been developing XR technology for the past ten years. We currently power over 65 augmented, mixed and virtual reality devices that are based on our purpose-built Snapdragon XR processors: Snapdragon XR1, XR2 and XR2+. The volume production of these chips and the wide availability are reasons you are seeing so many reasonably priced and highly capable XR products coming to market. And Snapdragon XR Platforms power a majority of them.
2. Available software tools and transitional technologies
Programming in XR is a new art form, and developers can use all the help they can get in learning and creating new applications. These new immersive experiences require the precise tracking of user inputs like head, eye and hand tracking to make those experiences feel believable. Our developer kit, Snapdragon Spaces, follows the OpenXR standard that was created to fix the challenge of requiring developers to re-build XR applications for different hardware platforms. We believe a tool made for one platform should be easily adaptable to run on whichever headset they want. We are creating an open, accessible approach to XR.
Because the more places a developer’s application can run, the bigger their market can be and the lower the costs can be for everyone. Fortunately, the market is growing: Research firms IDC, ABI, and CCS project that an average of 37 million XR units will ship in 2025[1].
We also think the best way to bring the world of XR to more people is to make it easy for developers to adapt existing mobile apps for XR headsets. Technology like our Dual Render Fusion, which is a feature just enabled though Snapdragon Spaces, allows smartphone app developers to quickly build extensions that pair XR glasses with smartphone-based controls.
To accelerate the creation of these applications and other products, we’ve committed up to $100M via our Snapdragon Metaverse Fund to help makers build new immersive experiences. To date, we’ve deployed millions in funds, and we’re actively looking for more innovators.
Coming Soon
As XR enters a new period of acceleration, these factors above will yield a bounty of better XR experiences, and quickly. Look for improvements like smaller and more comfortable headsets; more and better uses for XR including fitness, games and content, plus industrial, productivity, and collaboration apps. We will soon also see much more immersive XR experiences as the hardware improves and software makers learn how to use it, and a rapid increase in the number and quality of “mixed reality” applications that blend the real world with the digital.
We can also expect to see processing to be distributed between multiple devices in proximity. This means flexible hardware architectures where XR headsets make use of the computing power available in smartphones and PCs when those devices are needed and available. And, of course, even more innovation and specialization in the headset market.
There are many ways to build the world of XR. We have some innovative ideas, and other hardware companies, most of which use our chipsets, have more. We are eager to see how businesses and customers adapt to this new, fundamental technology. And we hope everyone in the world who wants it can experience it for themselves with affordable yet capable hardware.
[1] Average of XR data projections from research firms IDC, ABI, and CCS.
Quelle:
Foto: Amira Karaoud / Reuters – stock.adobe.com
