Along with the new Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 and Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, Qualcomm has also introduced a new Wireless AR Smart Viewer Reference Design that OEMs could adapt into commercial headsets at the Snapdragon Night event in China. The design is powered by the new Snapdragon XR2 Platform and reference design hardware of it was developed by Goertek.
The main highlights of the Wireless AR design are its slim, light and balanced weight distribution. Compared to its predecessor, which is the XR1, the new design has a tethering system that uses Wi-Fi 6/6E and Bluetooth instead of a USB-C cable, thanks to the company’s FastConnect 6900 solution. Due to its new processing architecture to distribute computing workloads between the smartphone and the AR glass, it achieves 3ms of latency.
The Wireless AR Smart Viewer comes with a dual micro-OLED binocular display with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 per eye, up to 90Hz, and a no-motion-blur, dual monochrome cameras and one RGB camera on the smart viewer enable six-degrees of freedom (6DoF) head tracking and hand tracking with gesture recognition to achieve AR precision.
When it comes to the software side, FastConnect XR Software Suite system integrators and application developers obtain optimised features that allow better control and preferential channel access for XR traffic to improve M2R2P (motionto-render-to-photon) latency, reduce jitter, and avoid unwanted interference, with purpose-built power modes for low power operation.
The Wireless AR Smart Viewer reference design is available for select partners, with wider availability expected in the coming months.