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Xiaomi Unveils Wireless AR Glasses Prototype, Powered by Same Chipset as Meta Quest Pro

From roadtovr

Chinese tech giant Xiaomi today showed off a prototype AR headset at Mobile World Congress (MWC) that wirelessly connects to the user’s smartphone, making for what the company calls its “first wireless AR glasses to utilize distributed computing.”

Called Xiaomi Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition, the device is built upon the same Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1 chipset as Meta’s recently released Quest Pro VR standalone.

While specs are still thin on the ground, the company did offer some info on headline features. For now, Xiaomi is couching it as a “concept technology achievement,” so it may be a while until we see a full spec sheet.

Packing two microOLED displays, the company is boasting “retina-level” resolution, saying its AR glasses pack in 58 pixels per degree (PPD). For reference, Meta Quest Pro has a PPD of 22, while enterprise headset Varjo XR-3 cites a PPD of 70.

The company hasn’t announced the headset’s field of view (FOV), however it says its free-form light-guiding prisms “minimizes light loss and produces clear and bright images with a to-eye brightness of up to 1200nit.”

Electrochromic lenses are also said to adapt the final image to different lighting conditions, even including a full ‘blackout mode’ that ostensibly allows it to work as a VR headset as well.

Image courtesy Xiaomi

As for input, Xiaomi Wireless AR Glass includes onboard hand-tracking in addition to smartphone-based touch controls. Xiaomi says its optical hand-tracking is designed to let users to do things like select and open apps, swipe through pages, and exit apps.

As a prototype, there’s no pricing or availability on the table, however Xiaomi says the lightweight glasses (at 126g) will be available in a titanium-colored design with support for three sizes of nosepieces. An attachable glasses clip will also be available for near-sighted users.

In an exclusive hands-on, XDA Developers surmised it felt near production-ready, however one of the issues noted during a seemingly bump-free demo was battery life; the headset had to be charged in the middle of the 30-minute demo. Xiaomi apparently is incorporating a self-developed silicon-oxygen anode battery that is supposedly smaller than a typical lithium-ion battery. While there’s an onboard Snapdragon XR 2 Gen 1 chipset, XDA Developers also notes it doesn’t offer any storage, making a compatible smartphone requisite to playing AR content.

This isn’t the company’s first stab at XR tech; last summer Xiaomi showed off a pair of consumer smartglasses, called Mijia Glasses Camera, that featured a single heads-up display. Xiaomi’s Wireless AR Glass is however much closer in function to the concept it teased in late 2021, albeit with chunkier free-form light-guiding prisms than the more advanced-looking waveguides teased two years ago.

Xiaomi is actively working closely with chipmaker Qualcomm to ensure compatibility with Snapdragon Spaces-ready smartphones, which include Xiaomi 13 and OnePlus 11 5G. Possible other future contributions from Lenovo and Motorola, which have also announced their intentions to support Snapdragon Spaces.

Qualcomm announced Snapdragon Spaces in late 2021, a software tool kit which focuses on performance and low power devices which allows developers to create head-worn AR experiences from the ground-up, or add head-worn AR to existing smartphone apps.

Qualcomm Reveals Snapdragon AR2 Processor for Glasses-sized AR Devices

From roadtovr

Qualcomm today announced Snapdragon AR2, its “purpose-built headworn augmented reality platform.” Differentiating from the company’s existing Snapdragon XR2 chips, Qualcomm says the AR2 architecture is better suited for creating AR glasses with low power consumption and compact form factors.

Today during Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit event, the company revealed the Snapdragon AR2 platform which consists of a trio of chips which the company says will help make truly glasses-sized AR devices possible.

Qualcomm was early to the standalone VR space and has been dominant with its Snapdragon XR2 chips which have found their way into many of the leading standalone headsets on the market, and are now in more than 60 devices total, the company says.

Aiming to take a similar bite out of the forthcoming AR glasses segment, Qualcomm has created a new Snapdragon AR2 platform with a distributed processing design. The platform consists of three chips:

  • AR processor (for sensor perception and video output)
  • AR co-processor (for sensor fusion and dedicated computer vision tasks)
  • Wi-Fi 7 chip (for communication to a host processing device)

By creating a more distributed workload across a main processor and a co-processor, Qualcomm claims AR2 is up to 50% more power efficient while offering 2.5 times better AI performance, and a more compact form-factor, compared to the single-chip Snapdragon XR2 solution.

Not only will the AR processor and co-processor help share a workload, Qualcomm also sees AR2 devices using the speedy Wi-Fi 7 chip to communicate with a host device like a smartphone or wireless compute puck that will do the heavy lifting like application processing and rendering. Qualcomm claims the Wi-Fi 7 chip (FastConnect 7800) can achieve 5.8 Gbps bandwidth with just 2ms of latency.

Using this three-chip framework for distributed processing, Qualcomm claims it will be possible to build compact AR glasses that consume less than one watt of power.

The AR2 platform supports up to nine concurrent cameras for a bevy of head-tracking, environment-sensing, and user-tracking tasks.

“We built Snapdragon AR2 to address the unique challenges of headworn AR and provide industry leading processing, AI and connectivity that can fit inside a stylish form factor,” said Hugo Swart, vice president of XR product management at Qualcomm. “With the technical and physical requirements for VR/MR and AR diverging, Snapdragon AR2 represents another metaverse-defining platform in our XR portfolio to help our OEM partners revolutionize AR glasses.”

There’s no word yet on when the first AR2 devices will hit the market, but Qualcomm lists a handful of partners actively working with the platform: Lenovo, LG, Niantic, Nreal, Oppo, Pico, Qonoq, Rokid, Sharp, TCL, Vuzix, and Xiaomi.