How Qualcomm wants to arm the movement for open XR | Hugo Swart interview

venturebeat.com:

Missed the GamesBeat Summit excitement? Don't worry! Tune in now to catch all of the live and virtual sessions here.

Apple finally entered the market for mixed reality this week as it showed off its Apple Vision Pro headset at its spaceship headquarters in Silicon Valley.

But it’s easy to forget that last week’s Augmented World Expo celebrated the same kind of technology and it was full of companies that wanted to pursue something very different. While Apple CEO Tim Cook didn’t mention the word “metaverse” at the event, he also didn’t make any case for openness.

Yet Qualcomm, the big designer of semiconductor chips for mobile and XR devices, is one of the companies that want the open side of the metaverse industry to prosper. For instance, Mark Zuckerberg’s new Meta Quest 3 VR headset coming this fall for $500 will use Qualcomm technology. I spoke with Hugo Swart, head of XR at Qualcomm, about this during the AWE event last week.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: Tell me about what you see coming.

Hugo Swart: On the hardware side, we showed DigiLens and DCL. These are all-in-one AR glasses with XR2. They’re both slated to have Snapdragon Spaces. That means applications that were built using our APIs – essentially OpenXR APIs – are going to be compatible with both devices. Then we went a bit on our vision for AR glasses.

We expect distributed compute to be the norm, where you don’t have everything in the glasses. You have some functions running in the glasses, like head tracking or hand tracking. Some of the perception algorithms will be here. You’ll have a companion host, whether a phone or a PC. Then here’s where the applications are running, where you do the rendering, and send it back. Image