Qualcomm’s new AR glasses are thinner and wireless

Qualcomm

The wireless version of the augmented reality Smart Viewer is a reference design that could be adapted into commercial headsets. The Wireless AR Smart Viewer uses a higher-powered chipset, a tethering system that uses wi-fi 6 and 6e, and a USB-C cable instead of a modem. The tradeoff of a potentially very short battery life is what comes with it.

The new viewer was developed by Goertek. It is currently available to a few manufacturing partners with plans to expand in the coming months. Like its predecessor, it connects to a phone or computer and delivers mixed reality experiences with full head and hand tracking, using tracking cameras and projections powered by micro-OLED displays. The 1920x1080 resolution and 90Hz refresh rate has not changed, but the field of view has.

That is much smaller than the non-consumer focused Magic Leap 2. The slimmer profile of the Smart Viewer is in its favor. The frames are much deeper than the wired version, which makes the glasses look bug-eyed. The design uses freeform optics, which might be harder to achieve with a wider FOV. It's a little heavier than the 106-gram Nreal Light glasses, a bit lighter than the rumored 150 grams of Apple's augmented/ virtual reality headset, and far svelter than the 503-gram virtual reality headset.

The previous model of the wireless viewer used the XR1 but the new model uses the XR2 to offer more power for computer vision processing and other tasks. If you have a phone or PC with the FastConnect 6900 chip, you can expect a 3ms latency between the glasses and the phone. That is not a given for many machines. The actual motion to photon is under 20ms, just clearing the threshold for a comfortable mixed reality experience.

One of the challenges of augmented reality is making high-powered glasses that don't run out of juice almost immediately. The most demanding virtual experiences could drain the headset's battery in 30 minutes, although he emphasized that a light, simple virtual overlay could use less power. Users can plug in an attachable battery with a cable, and manufacturers could choose to prioritize a longer- lasting headset in their own designs. Creating a set of virtual monitors you can use all day at work is one of the most obvious applications that the current tech can support.

We weren't able to try the new Smart Viewer ourselves, and consumers might never buy hardware that looks exactly like the reference design since manufacturers could modify the system to their own specifications. At least four manufacturers are being worked with, but he didn't say how long it would take to make the headset. The Nreal Light and the ThinkReality A3 glasses are examples of what wireless headsets might look like in the future.