Will 2022 be the Year of the Metaverse? News coming out of CES 2022 suggests this will be the case, as Qualcomm Tuesday followed up Nvidia’s metaverse-related announcement a day earlier with a big one of its own: Qualcomm is working with Microsoft on a chip specially designed for augmented reality glasses.
Framing the news as a metaverse update from a company that was “at CES years ago talking about XR [extended reality] before it was popular,” Qualcomm president and CEO Cristiano Amon said, “We’re developing a custom augmented reality Snapdragon chip for next-generation power-efficient, very lightweight AR glasses from the Microsoft ecosystem, and we’re integrating into that chip platform software from both companies.”
Regarding the software integration, he explained that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Spaces XR Developer Platform would be “fully integrated” into Microsoft’s Mesh virtual collaboration software for virtual and augmented reality environments.
The announcement shows how the term “metaverse” is quickly starting to absorb years of investment in and development around extended reality products and applications–augmented, virtual and mixed reality included. These efforts now are being viewed as key elements and tools for enabling the broader metaverse concept being embraced by Meta (Facebook) and others.
Speaking of Meta, Qualcomm and Meta teamed up to hype the metaverse concept late last year at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Tech Summit, and Qualcomm of late seems to have become more vocal about its metaverse investments and efforts, which it reportedly claimed go back about a decade.
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