Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said Tuesday that the company is developing more than 40 different AI wearable devices, including jewelry, camera-equipped earbuds, pins and watches. It’s a sign of how aggressively chipmakers are betting that the next major computing platform won’t be mobile phones.
To further this vision, Qualcomm announced two new products. One is a platform called Snapdragon Reality Elite for mixed reality glasses designed to run more powerful on-device AI, and the other is the Scalable Turnkey AI-Ready Toolkit (START), a combination of hardware modules and software stack for AI devices starting with smart glasses.
According to the company, the new Snapdragon Reality Elite delivers up to 60% better GPU performance, up to 30% better CPU performance, and up to 160% better NPU performance compared to the previous XR platform. Percentage improvements in chip specs can be difficult to contextualize, but Qualcomm does provide one concrete data point, saying the platform can run a 3 billion parameter language model at 45 tokens per second. This is fast enough for quick and responsive AI interactions. Qualcomm says the chip will enable better head and hand tracking along with improved viewing capabilities.
Snapdragon Reality Elite supports 4.4K resolution per eye at 90fps. This is a slight improvement over the XR2+ Gen 2’s 4.3K resolution per eye. (Higher per-eye resolution and frame rates mean a sharper and smoother visual experience, which is paramount to reducing motion sickness and eye strain that have historically made headset use uncomfortable for extended periods of time.)
Qualcomm says the platform is designed to power two types of devices: standalone video transparent (VST) headsets, which superimpose digital content over real-world camera feeds, and lightweight tethered optically transparent (OST) glasses, which blend digital images directly into the field of view. Among the first devices to use it are XREAL Project Aura, which debuted at Google I/O earlier this year, and a device coming soon at Play for Dream.
Meanwhile, START consists of AR chips, a software platform, a companion app, and a white label program to help hardware manufacturers get to market faster. Through its white label program, the company is offering three reference designs: an audio + camera setup, a monocular display, and a binocular display, similar to Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses.
O’Neill, which owns eyewear manufacturers Inspecs and TitanFlex, will be the first partners in the white label program. Qualcomm says START will expand to support other form factors beyond smart glasses in the future.
Amon’s comments on CNBC crystallize the strategic logic behind both announcements. He argued that as companies seek to collect more real-world data from users to power their AI agents, we will see a new wave of hardware startups building new form factors, which will have a major impact on existing smartphone players such as Apple and Samsung.
“I think there will be a lot of experimentation with different form factors,” Amon said. “Currently we have more than 40 designs for that device. The type of form factors is very broad.” “The principle is what you wear, what is with you at all times, being able to see the world around you, so that you have context and the ability to approach the agent and have a conversation with the agent,” he added.
To that end, Qualcomm is explicitly positioning itself as the fundamental silicon layer for everything that comes after smartphones. In particular, START’s white label program is designed to lower barriers to new entrants.
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