With everyone and their aunties talking about the metaverse these days, Qualcomm has continued to show more support for VR/AR by introducing their new reference design for the Wireless AR Smart Viewer headset powered by their Snapdragon XR2 Platform. Their design goal is to cut the cord and give their OEMs and ODMs a more seamless and cost-effective way to bring lightweight and premium AR glasses into the market.
The reference design would aim to eliminate the cord between the AR glasses and any compatible hardware such as smartphones, Windows PC, or standalone processing pucks while achieving a virtually lag-free AR experience using a fully integrated Qualcomm FastConnect 6900 system combined with the new FastConnect XR Software Suite.
The Snapdragon XR2 Platform is said to pack powerful performance into a slim, smaller AR glass form factor. The reference design hardware developed by Goertek has a 40% thinner profile and a more ergonomically balanced weight distribution for increased comfort. Up to 1920x1080 pixels per eye and frame rates of up to 90Hz to deliver a seamless AR experience. Head and hand tracking is done using dual monochrome cameras and one RGB camera on the viewer to enable six-degrees of freedom (6DoF).
The computing workload will be split between the smartphone and the AR glass enabled by the system’s wireless split processing architecture. The latency between devices will be < 3ms for a truly immersive experience. The device also offers the fastest commercially available speeds and increased range with FastConnect 6900 solution compromising of Wi-Fi 6 / 6E and Bluetooth.
