Predictions about the imminent emergence of AR/VR (Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality) headsets as a major force in consumer and enterprise have been proven wrong, as the technology has been on a slow roll over the past three to four years.
Indeed, while there are several headsets available (such as Microsoft Hololens, primarily geared towards enterprise use, and Oculus, HTC Vivo, Lenovo, Oppo, and Xiaomi, among others that are mostly geared towards consumer/gaming), the price to procure headsets (up to $2K each) and the amount of effort to build and deploy solutions is still relatively high.
This is especially true because building a headset and complimentary software to power the device has been primarily a one-off effort with little hardware standardization, and despite efforts to make things “easier” through development toolkits ( such as Microsoft Windows and Azure XR toolkits, Google ARCore, Epic Games Unreal Engine, Unity Pro). Qualcomm wants to make things much simpler and more standard with its Snapdragon Spaces program.
What made PCs and smartphones so prevalent is an ecosystem of reference designs that included both hardware and software assets. It became increasingly easy to design and build the devices. The chip makers and OS providers did a good job of taking much of the basic complexity out of the designs, leaving the device makers to customize and “fine tune” their products to suit market needs and differentiate on features. And while many of the current generation of headsets are built on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips, there is still a difference in how each is designed and powered.
Qualcomm is introducing its Snapdragon Spaces™ XR (Extended Reality) Developer Platform, to build AR headsets and easily couple them with the Android Smartphone ecosystem. Snapdragon Spaces is based on the Khronos® OpenXR™ specification to enable application portability and is the first headset AR platform optimized for devices tethered to smartphones using the OpenXR runtime. This is important as I expect many AR/XR systems in the future to be smartphone connected and powered.
Snapdragon Spaces includes an AR developer kit to enable solution providers to build a fully immersive experience. And it leverages all the work Qualcomm has done over many years on hardware assisted features necessary to make AR a reality, like spatial mapping and meshing, occlusion, plane detection, object and image recognition and tracking, local anchors and persistence, and scene understanding, as well as sensor assisted positional tracking and hand tracking.
And of course, Qualcomm has the ability to bring its expertise in connectivity with 5G and Wi-Fi assets to handle the need for low latency and reliable connections to power the AR experience. It also leverages the software assets Qualcomm obtained when it acquired CLAY Air for hand tracking, and it has now announced it is acquiring Wikitude to leverage the 150,000-plus developers using that platform for AR development. A full platform approach requires both hardware and sottware assets and Qualcomm understands that it needs both to be successful.
While there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to make AR generally available and more affordable, this effort by Qualcomm is a good step to making devices more compatible and building out a more standards based design platform.
Any standardization on reference designs and development environments is a win for the expansion of the use of AR systems, particularly if solution providers are able to move up the development stack and not be concerned with developing all of the low level device capabilities. Furthermore standardization usually results in more volume, which can mean a much less expensive device. But there are still a significant number of hurdles to overcome in making AR devices ubiquitous, including battery life, connectivity (although 5G and Wi-Fi 6 help this greatly) and a better understanding of the best psychological form factors and informational display requirements.
Aside from some gaming apps and a limited number of enterprise solutions, there are still many hurdles to overcome to making AR a reality for a majority of consumers and enterprise users. Anything that Qualcomm and others can do to make things more standardized will certainly help adoption. As such, Snapdragon Spaces is a good step forward in accelerating AR adoption, and it’s likely to help Qualcomm maintain its dominance with its processors powering the AR headset space.
Jack Gold is founder and principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, LLC., an information technology analyst firm based in Northborough, Massachusetts. He has more than 25 years of experience as an analyst and covers the many aspects of business and consumer computing and emerging technologies. He works with many companies. Follow Jack on Twitter and on LinkedIn.