What your future VR/AR goggles could do with Qualcomm's new XR2 chip

If you wanna know where the future of VR and AR is heading as early as 2020 look to a company like Qualcomm, its chips are inside most of the most popular VR and AR headsets already like HoloLens to or Oculus quest. Its new chip, the XR2 is what i'm trying right now in a very early form. With a teleconferencing app made by Spatial, I'm using it to connect with somebody wearing HoloLens 2, someone wearing an Oculus quest, someone on an Android phone and me on this pre reference design hardware, to take a look at what's going to happen. We just started to see Standalone VR and AR headsets this past year like the Oculus Quest and how lines to with the xr2. The Qualcomm is making is aiming to do is build out a better headset going forward. So we're just getting an early Glimpse at what this could be. What I have here is not even the beginning of a reference design, but the technological capabilities of this are really exciting especially you've been following the field. The xR two will have a lot better graphics than existing chips. It will also have higher resolution up to 3k by 3k per i Which is not quite retina, but it's definitely getting there. And the demo I saw has much higher resolution graphics than what you'd get on Occulus Quest. You can also do hand tracking. You can do eye tracking. You can do a variety of cameras. The XR2 supports seven different cameras at once. So you could have one's aiming say your lips or your face and be able to create virtual avatars based on that. And it's also 5g capable. Now not all headsets are going to use 5g for this, but it's the beginning of Qualcomm looking at what a 5g standalone AR VR headset would do, and that'll probably be stuff for the enterprise space versus for consumers. [MUSIC] Another thing this will do, which maybe you have to wrap your head around, is what's kind of called pass through mixed reality or what Qualcomm calls true mixed reality. So if you've seen things like HoloLens do or magically That are projecting things into the real world. There's another way which is that VR headsets can use their cameras to bring the real world into VR. There are a lot of VR headsets that can already begin to do that like HTC Vive, but the xr2 is supposed to provide really fast low latency with that. So that you could blend the virtual and the real at home in a VR headset. What could that look like? Well, that's why we're here at Spatial's headquarters. Spatial is a company that looks at telepresence technology for the future. They already have an app that works across devices VR and AR and the test I did was using one of these XR two chip devices along with an Oculus quest, which is Facebook's $400 VR headset HoloLens two which is a thousands of dollar enterprise headset and an Android phone. And we're all these virtual avatars, including a virtual version of myself and. Gathered around this conference room, and then we get teleported into the storefront space to show how we can eventually mock up our model other sorts of environments not just a work room. What will Qualcomm's x or two chip be? Well, maybe we're at the beginning. Of where laptops and smartphones have been, where we have a common chip that runs across a wide variety of products. VR and AR have just gotten started, but we may be at the point where they start sharing more common hardware inside, and that will enable all sorts of things that we can't even imagine yet in headsets. So, this is an early peek, and we'll see a lot more over the course of the next year In VR and AR, neither of which are going anywhere, in fact, it looks like they're just gonna be on the rise. [SOUND]