Meta Quest revolutionized how people interact in a VR setting. With Meta Quest, users watch movies and on-demand events together as if they were in the same room, get motivated by real coaches or even tag along with astronauts on missions on the International Space Station.
As users seek more advanced experiences within VR, Qualcomm and Meta agreed to a multi-year deal to collaborate on a new era of spatial computing powered by Snapdragon extended reality (XR) platforms and technologies for the Meta Quest platform. The companies will work on customized VR chipsets powered by Snapdragon XR platforms and technology.
“Building off our joint leadership in XR, this agreement will allow our companies to deliver best-in-class devices and experiences to transform how we work, play, learn, create and connect in a fully realized metaverse,” said Cristiano Amon, president and CEO, Qualcomm
Snapdragon XR technologies are designed to merge the physical world with digital. Users and communities interact, play, compete, work and create through lifelike avatars. And with the combination of high performance and low power computing, 5G and AI, XR is predicted to impact the world more so than PCs and smartphones combined.
“Unlike mobile phones, building virtual reality brings novel, multi-dimensional challenges in spatial computing, cost, and form factor,” said Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO, Meta. “These chipsets will help us keep pushing virtual reality to its limits and deliver awesome experiences.”
The companies worked together on VR innovations for more than seven years, most recently with Meta Quest 2. The Snapdragon XR2 Platform delivered performance enhancements in the Quest 2 that included:
- Powering a high-resolution display with 50% more pixels than the original Oculus Quest headset.
- Delivering more than 11x AI processing than its predecessor.
- Incorporating the Engine for Visual Analytics (EVA) computer vision dedicated processor, which helps offload key VR-related tasks for tracking to enable low latency and reduce overall power consumption.
- Premium Wi-Fi 6 performance of the Qualcomm FastConnect 6800 connectivity system that enabled Quest 2 to achieve wireless VR with faster download speeds.
“As we continue to build more advanced capabilities and experiences for virtual and augmented reality, it has become more important to build specialized technologies to power our future VR headsets and other devices,” said Zuckerberg.
This agreement solidified the mutual commitment to deliver multiple generations of premium devices and experiences powered by custom VR platforms in the years to come.
Edited by
Erik Linask
