Qualcomm this week unveiled what it describes as the world’s first purpose-built head-worn augmented reality platform, Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1, as part of its extended reality (XR) portfolio.
The architecture achieves 50% lower power consumption and 2.5x better AI performance compared to the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1 platform, enabling high performance, sleeker-looking AR glasses.
Snapdragon AR2 is in various stages of development with OEMs, including Lenovo, LG, Sharp, TCL, Tencent, Xiaomi and others, according to Qualcomm.
As CNET noted, Qualcomm is leaning heavily on phones, computers and the cloud to do quite a bit of the heavy lifting for these future glasses, which are expected to arrive between 2023 and 2025.
Calling out Wi-Fi
Qualcomm is known for its pioneering work in the cellular world – CDMA is where it cut its teeth, so to speak. But it’s also heavily into Wi-Fi, and that’s part of what makes the processing power behind this XR platform so compelling, according to Jessse Burke, marketing director at Qualcomm.
Earlier this year, Qualcomm announced its Wi-Fi 7 capable family of platforms. The products combine Wi-Fi features with Qualcomm-specific technologies to improve speeds, lower latency and overall enhance the experience. Rivals like Intel, MediaTek and Broadcom also have announced Wi-Fi 7 products.
What's relevant about Wi-Fi 7?
“Like any new standard, it delivers some cool, important new advances, but many of them are gradual or incremental updates or improvements,” Burke said.
Looking at past generations of Wi-Fi, each generation brought some kind of new “magic,” he said. Wi-Fi 5 was about expanding into the 5 GHz band. Wi-Fi 6 had a lot to do with establishing multi-user technologies and introduced OFDMA, which enables higher network performance in congested environments, so more devices can be supported.
And Wi-Fi 7? It enables a 320-megahertz channel versus the 160-megahertz channels with Wi-Fi 6.
Wider channels mean more data, and the faster you can move the data over a wider channel, the quicker you get that connection done, which reduces interference and latency.
"That ain’t nothing, but it’s fairly well understood,” he said.
Wi-Fi 7 also supports 4K quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) technology, which translates to speeds 2.4x faster than Wi-Fi 6.
But Wi-Fi 7 also introduces ways to manipulate multiple links to maximize the use of spectrum, and that's something Qualcomm is highlighting.
While groups like the Wi-Fi Alliance are advocating in many regions of the world for 6 GHz spectrum to be made available for Wi-Fi, the reality is it’s not available everywhere. In regions where there’s no 6 GHz available, multi-link technology allows for channel aggregation using different spectrum bands.
Qualcomm calls it High Band Simultaneous, or HBS Multi-Link, referring to support for 5 GHz and 6 GHz together. That leads to better throughput and latency.
Wi-Fi 7 will be delivered via the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. When it comes to mobile, PC, and AR, HBS Multi-Link is the must-have feature, Burke said. Without it, a Wi-Fi 7 device will look a lot like a Wi-Fi 6 device.