ar industry

US Congress Halts Orders of Microsoft AR Combat Goggles Amid Reports of Headaches & Eyestrain

January 13, 2023 From roadtovr

In 2021, Microsoft won a United States Army defense contract worth up to $22 billion which would support the development of an Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), a tactical AR headset for soldiers based on HoloLens 2. Now Congress has rejected the Army’s request for $400 million to buy as many as 6,900 more of the AR combat goggles this year, a Bloomberg report maintains.

The rejection cites rocky tests conducted last year. Testing was done over a three-week period ending June 18th, where the Army assessed Microsoft’s IVAS with a cadre of 70 Army infantry soldiers, who were tasked with using the device during three 72-hour combat scenarios.

Complaints included “mission-affecting physical impairments,” with more than 80 percent of soldiers experiencing headaches, eyestrain and nausea after less than three hours using the goggles.

None of this comes as a giant surprise though, as Microsoft was reportedly bracing for negative field tests back in early 2022 due to alleged quality problems.

Softening the blow somewhat, lawmakers have earmarked $40 million to develop a new IVAS model, Army spokesman David Patterson said in an email obtained by Bloomberg.

This comes only a few weeks after the Army awarded a $125 million “task order” for the development of a new model, dubbed version 1.2, which is said to include software improvements for better reliability and reduced power demand.

The 1.2 version task order is said to provide “improvements based on completed test events” which aim at a developing a “lower profile Heads-Up Display with distributed counterweight for improved user interface and comfort.”

In the meantime, the Army will be using its first batch of 5,000 goggles for training—only a small fraction of the max 121,000 devices, spares and support services stipulated in the $22 billion deal.

Qualcomm Reveals Snapdragon AR2 Processor for Glasses-sized AR Devices

November 16, 2022 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.

Varjo Raises $40M Series D Funding to Expand Cloud-based XR Platform

September 7, 2022 From roadtovr

Varjo, maker of high-end enterprise XR headsets, this week announced it has raised a $40 million Series D investment to continue building its Varjo Reality Cloud software and deliver a “true-to-life industrial metaverse.”

Varjo makes some of the highest-end enterprise XR headsets on the market, along with unique software solutions, claiming recently that one quarter of Fortune 100 companies have used used its tech.

This week the company announced it has raised $40 million in a Series D investment. Participants in the round include returning investors EQT Ventures, Atomico, Volvo Car Tech Fund, and Lifeline Ventures, and new investors Mirabaud and Foxconn, the latter being one of the world’s largest electronics manufacturers and a potential strategic partner for Varjo.

The leading investor in the round was not made clear. The raise brings Varjo’s total funding to $162.5 million since 2017, according to Crunchbase, and represents a down-round compared to the company’s Series C investment of $54 million in 2020.

“Our new funding is a testament to the incredible growth Varjo has seen over the past few years as interest for enterprise XR adoption grows,” said Timo Toikkanen, Varjo CEO. “The vision for a true-to-life metaverse for professionals is already here, and we are proud to be the first and only company in the world to continue to deliver human-eye resolution virtual and mixed reality technology to the largest and most iconic enterprises in the world.”

The so-called “metaverse for professionals” isn’t clearly defined by the company though it ostensibly refers to Varjo Reality Cloud, the company’s cloud-based XR streaming tech which aims to streamline the use of XR within large organizations. The company plans to expand the platform to a wider range of hardware and software, including headsets other than its own. Check out our exclusive preview of Varjo Reality Cloud earlier this year.

Alongside the funding announcement Varjo also named a new Chief Product Officer, Patrick Wyatt, who is said to be leading the company’s software and cloud projects.

Beyond its enterprise ambitions, Varjo also recently dipped a toe into the prosumer space with the release of its high-end Aero VR headset which, for the first time, could be bought by general consumers without any kind of monthly fee. The company’s Series D funding announcement didn’t offer any hints about the future of the Aero, but Varjo told us earlier this year that there’s a good chance of an eventual follow-up to the headset.

Meta & Qualcomm Join “Multi-year” XR Chip Partnership to Combat a Common Threat

September 3, 2022 From roadtovr

Two of the biggest names in XR—headset maker Meta and chip maker Qualcomm—today announced a “multi-year broad strategic agreement” to collaborate on “customized virtual reality chipsets” for future devices.

Qualcomm, a leading provider of smartphone processors, was an early mover in the XR space by pushing variants of its Snapdragon mobile processors as ideal for use in both AR and VR headsets—a play which now sees the company’s product in the vast majority of standalone headsets available on the market today.

Meta has used Qualcomm processors in all of its standalone headsets to date—Go, Quest, and Quest 2—and is expected to do the same in its forthcoming Project Cambria headset.

Today Meta and Qualcomm jointly announced they have entered into a “multi-year broad strategic agreement” to work together on XR platform development. The agreement was a big enough deal that the CEOs of both companies made the announcement together during the IFA 2022 conference.

“We’re working with Qualcomm Technologies on customized virtual reality chipsets— powered by Snapdragon XR platforms and technology—for our future roadmap of Quest products,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “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.”

With the companies having already worked together over the last several years, it’s a curious announcement—what gives?

On its face the announcement likely represents a commitment by Qualcomm to make Meta a top priority client over the next several years, devoting more time to the company and offering it more influence over future Snapdragon XR chips from Qualcomm. And with Meta believing that it’s going to take a complete rethinking of the typical computing architecture to make the sci-fi vision of XR a reality, the companies will probably be prototyping together on that front as well.

But there’s likely another major reason for this partnership—it brings two allies together against a common threat: Apple.

Though Apple hasn’t formally announced any XR products yet, all signs point to a long history of R&D and a desire for the company to dominate the space. For Meta, which itself wants to control the destiny of XR, that’s a problem. Mark Zuckerberg has been eyeing this potentiality since at least as far back as 2015, which drove him to buy Oculus in the first place—in an effort to get out ahead of companies like Apple and Google in the nascent XR space.

But Apple is a problem for Qualcomm too… Apple is sure to use its own custom processors (colloquially referred to as ‘Apple silicon’) in its XR products. By definition then, the greater marketshare that Apple has in the XR space, the fewer Snapdragon chips Qualcomm will sell.

Apple has long been building its own custom processors for its smartphones which has given the company and edge over competitors using commodity chips. In the last few years Apple has also begun phasing out third-party processors in favor of its own chips in its PC products, signaling a maturation of the company’s microprocessor design and fabrication capabilities.

For Meta, the partnership with Qualcomm buttresses a strategic vulnerability by giving the company a committed ally that can make chips that are highly specialized for XR devices.

For Qualcomm, the partnership with Meta is an effort to ensure that Apple doesn’t easily dominate the XR market and snuff out the company’s opportunity to sell chips to a wide variety of non-Apple XR device makers.

Ultimately the partnership is a maneuver in a fight for early ground in a market that the companies expect will one day be worth trillions of dollars.

Magic Leap Commits to OpenXR & WebXR Support Later This Year on ML2

June 7, 2022 From roadtovr

In an ongoing shift away from a somewhat proprietary development environment on its first headset, Magic Leap has committed to bringing OpenXR support to its Magic Leap 2 headset later this year.

Although Magic Leap 2 is clearly the successor to Magic Leap 1, the goal of the headsets are quite different. With the first headset the company attempted to court developers who would build entertainment and consumer-centric apps, and had its own ideas about how its ‘Lumin OS’ should handle apps and how they should be built.

After significant financial turmoil and then revival, the company emerged with new CEO and very different priorities for Magic Leap 2. Not only would the headset be clearly and unequivocally positioned for enterprise use-cases, the company also wants to make it much easier to build apps for the headset.

To that end Magic Leap’s VP of Product Marketing & Developer Programs, Lisa Watts, got on stage at week’s AWE 2022 to “announce and reaffirm to all of you and to the entire industry [Magic Leap’s] support for open standards, and making our platform very easy to develop for.”

In the session, which was co-hosted by Chair of the OpenXR Working Group, Brent Insko, Watts reiterated that Magic Leap 2 is built atop an “Android Open Source Project-based OS interface standard,” and showed a range of open and accessible tools that developers can currently use to build for the headset.

Toward the end of the year, Watts shared, the company expects Magic Leap 2 to also include support for OpenXR, Vulkan, and WebXR.

OpenXR is a royalty-free standard that aims to standardize the development of VR and AR applications, making hardware and software more interoperable. The standard has been in development since 2017 and is backed by virtually every major hardware, platform, and engine company in the VR industry, and a growing number AR players.

In theory, an AR app built to be OpenXR compliant should work on any OpenXR compliant headset—whether that be HoloLens 2 or Magic Leap 2—without any changes to the application.

OpenXR has picked up considerable steam in the VR space and is starting to see similar adoption momentum in the AR space, especially with one of the sector’s most visible companies, Magic Leap, on board.