Snapdragon AR2 is designed to make compact wireless AR glasses possible

• Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1 at its 2022 Snapdragon Summit.
• The AR2 uses Wi-Fi 7 connectivity for minimal latency between your phone and glasses.
• Compared to its last AR glasses prototype with XR2, the AR2 uses 50% less power, is 40% smaller, and can process data on the glasses directly.
• It uses the main AR processor for hand tracking and analysis and a co-processor for eye tracking.

In January, the two companies announced that they were working together on augmented reality chips. The world's first purpose-built headworn augmented reality platform was shown off at this year's Snapdragon Summit.

The smallest processor used for augmented reality is 40% smaller than the previous one. You can either reduce the battery to make the glasses lighter or have them last twice as long.

It's faster at image recognition and hand tracking than previous chips, according to the company. It could be useful for live translations.

The co-processor is in the bridge of the augmented reality glasses. Tracking your eye movement is one of the things it does. This will allow foveated rendering, a powerful tool for better performance and battery life that appears on the PS VR2

The AR2 is able to communicate with your phone with less than 2ms of delay thanks to the fast connect 7800. Wireless augmented reality glasses will be more convenient and less noticeable to use in public.

We don't have a good idea of what the devices will look like. A number of companies are working on augmented reality glasses that use the AR2 chip.

We're curious to see if newer generations of devices make augmented reality more convenient and stylish, as the Nreal Air, OPPO Air Glass, and Lenovo Glasses T1 have done before.

This isn't the first time that Qualcomm has tried an augmented reality device. It first developed the XR1 for wired mixed-reality glasses and then used the Quest 2's chip for its wireless augmented reality viewer reference design. It's not clear what "first" means in this case, as the AR2 has several improvements over the XR2 in its portable and power demands for augmented reality glasses.

Despite this, we think that the future of augmented reality glasses is going to be better with the help of the Snapdragon. We're curious to see if the XR2 Gen 2 will use the same cores as the recently announced Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, which will likely power the Meta Quest 3 headset.