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Virtual Reality industry is making every attempt to get more customers absorb this technology. After smartphones, VR headsets are considered to be the next big revolutionary tech device and tech industry is working towards making these devices a one-stop destination for all your smart world needs.
This time, it’s the famous chipset maker, Qualcomm, who is the new entrant in the VR tech competition. The company has recently announced its own Virtual Reality Development Kit, which is basically Qualcomm’s prototype VR headset based on its latest Snapdragon 835 chipset.
Snapdragon 835 VR Development Kit
This latest development kit is an upgrade over its already existing Snapdragon 820 kit. The Snapdragon 835 VR development kit is a complete all-in-one wireless VR headset and comes with an AMOLED display with 2560 x 1440 resolution screen, just similar to the existing Gear VR.
Image credit: PC Advisor
The Snapdragon 835 VR headset comes with 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 64GB of UFS storage and several connectivity options like USB-C, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi. Besides these, the headset offers 6DoF motion tracking, foveated rendering, eye tracking and many other power management and performance features. Additionally, this headset offers an excellent 170 FOV.
Not to forget, Qualcomm has incorporated inside-out positional tracking for enhancing your room scale VR experiences. However, in order to implement the actual hand-tracking feature, Qualcomm is using the Leap Motion hand tracking feature.
Leap Motion Hand Tracking
Image credit: Wearable
Companies like Oculus and HTC have already arrived with their controllers implementing the hand-tracking features for its headsets, which lets you feel like your hand itself interacts with all the virtual world objects.
Leap Motion is one of the most advanced and independent tracking systems for virtual reality and brings some very exciting new features to your VR experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnlCGw-0R8g
In addition to SMI’s eye tracking and Leap Motion’s hand tracking features, the headset will also have a voice recognition feature, thereby delivering a truly wireless experience.
Qualcomm’s HMD Accelerator Program
Qualcomm has officially announced that it will make its Virtual Reality Development Kit available in the Q2 of 2017. Qualcomm has also announced the Head Mounted Display Accelerator Program for OEM manufacturers of virtual reality hardware.
Qualcomm here seems to be following a smartphone-like similar approach where it will just be shipping development kit to VR headset makers and this Accelerator Program will thereby give a big boost to companies to connect with Qualcomm’s supply chain partners.
This program will help HMD manufacturers to considerably reduce engineering costs and also speed up the process of creating and shipping new devices. Moreover, to ensure manufacturers deliver the best immersive, Qualcomm has also included some pre-defined quality metrics and methods.
Cristiano Amon, executive vice president, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., and president, QCT said “The HMD Accelerator Program is designed to increase scale and lower the barriers for manufacturers to create a cutting-edge HMD effectively and efficiently with pre-validated components while meeting required VR performance criteria. Qualcomm Technologies has laid the groundwork for consistent, successful and flexible product development so manufacturers can have a commercial product available within just a few months.”
I hope Qualcomm’s efforts turn out to be successful. That would ultimately ensure more quality and affordable headsets and would benefit the global user community overall.
I have always felt that qualcomm produces better processors then their competition and this article proves that point. This dev kit would open new doors to developers.
True… and the most important this i love about Qualcomm is their attempt to create a common market place and involve tech companies to build their product around a particular platform…
could be great. more low price, high quality headsets for 2017!