Qualcomm beefs up Snapdragon Space XR Developer Platform for immersive future

One of the key gating factors to the evolution of immersive technologies in real-world enterprise applications has been the availability of effective and comfortable head-worn devices and to rectify this for the business metaverse, Qualcomm Technologies has launched new features for its Snapdragon Spaces XR Developer Platform to hasten a cross-device, extended reality (XR) ecosystem and create a head-worn future that it says is truly open.

Qualcomm said it helped pioneer smartphone augmented reality (AR) over 13 years ago, and that with Snapdragon Spaces, is reimagining what smartphone-powered AR can be when combined with AR glasses. 

The latest Snapdragon Spaces SDK release aims to unlock the next evolution in smartphone-powered AR with a new Dual Render Fusion feature designed to enable developers to extend their 2D mobile applications into world-scale 3D experiences, without any prior XR experience required, and deliver smartphone AR’s full potential, making it accessible to a wider range of developers than ever before. Moreover, the enhancement is also attributed with being able to fuse “elegantly” the simplicity and familiarity smartphones with the capacity of AR glasses to enable immersive experiences.

The Snapdragon Spaces community is said to include thousands of developers and brands like Red Bull and Kittch and is regarded by Qualcomm as having been a critical building block in enhancing the platform’s features, helping to break through the limits of reality. It said innovative companies in XR are building across enterprise and consumer virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR) and AR in a variety of application categories.

Within enterprise collaboration, companies include Arthur Digital, Arvizio, Engage, Scope AR, Sphere and Taqtile. Productivity firms are headed by Glue Collaboration, MSM.digital, Nomtek, ShapesXR and vSpatial, while in the training arena, firms take in Pixo, Roundtable Learning, Strivr, Talespin, Transfr and Uptale.

Expanding the list of XR devices with committed support for Snapdragon Spaces are the OPPO MR Glasses and all-in-one AR devices from DigiLens and TCL RayNeo. ThinkReality VRX, an all-in-one VR headset engineered for the enterprise from long-standing Qualcomm partner Lenovo, has already been announced for worldwide availability.

The OPPO MR Glass Developer Edition features binocular video pass-through technologies and is equipped with two RGB cameras in front of the user’s eyes, to provide a stereoscopic view of the physical world. The OPPO MR Glass Developer Edition will be made available as a Snapdragon Spaces developer kit, distributed through EnlightXR in the second half of 2023. 

TCL RayNeo is developing a wide range of AR features, with committed support for Snapdragon Spaces, to create an AR ecosystem for consumers worldwide. TCL RayNeo X2 true AR glasses are expected to launch in the second quarter of 2023. DigiLens is set to launch an all-on-one Snapdragon Spaces-ready AR device, ARGO, designed for enterprise and industrial-lite workers.

To boost its standing in metaverse technologies even furtherer, as part of the Snapdragon Metaverse Fund which is designed to enable and foster innovation through venture investment in leading XR companies, Qualcomm Ventures has made investments in Survios, a VR game developer and software publisher; EnlightXR, a China-based XR ecosystem enabler; and Tangle, a developer of a virtual workspace for remote teams, in addition to the previously announced investments in TRIPP and Echo3D.