Qualcomm, maker of chips and technologies for mobile devices, today announced a reference design for a tethered AR headset which is tethered to a phone or PC but also contains its own chips to handle some onboard processing. The company calls the split-processing approach an AR smart viewer headset. Qualcomm’s latest reference design is a tethered AR headset which the company calls an AR smart viewer. What differentiates an AR smart viewer from a basic tethered AR viewer is the inclusion of onboard processing which helps to offload some of the work from the tethered device onto the headset itself. Basic tethered AR viewers send all of their sensor data to the tethered host device, usually a smartphone, which handles all of the sensor processing while also rendering the AR environment and application. For devices not designed for sustained workloads, that can push a smartphone to its limits in both power and cooling capabilities.
AR smart viewers include their own onboard processor which can handle some of the sensor processing and display tasks, ultimately reducing the power consumption of the tethered device by some 30%. The downside is greater expense due to the added processing hardware. Qualcomm created ready made software which will allow the AR smart viewer to run standard Android apps in floating windows, in addition to immersive AR applications. AR smart viewer headsets can alternatively be tethered Windows PCs for more flexibility, including the ability to run standard Windows applications on virtual monitors. Although Microsoft has its own ambitions with Windows Mixed Reality on both PC VR and standalone with HoloLens, the company seems open to Qualcomm’s efforts to include PCs as host devices for AR smart viewers. Qualcomm hopes that AR smart viewers will eventually break free of their tether and focus instead on a wireless connection to the host device.
More information:
https://www.roadtovr.com/qualcomm-ar-smart-viewer-headset-announcement/