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ZeroLight Created The VR Content Used In Qualcomm's Demo.

Qualcomm announced its Snapdragon XR2 5G back in December of last year, the second-gen 5G-enabled iteration of the companys mobile XR platform. For the uninitiated, XR is a term Qualcomm has coined to encompass technologies employed for Extend Reality experiences, an amalgam of virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality. Today the company is taking things a step further and announcing a new XR2 5G-based reference design that leverages this new platform and is designed to accelerate boundless XR over 5G device development for OEMs.

In addition, in conjunction with key partners like ZeroLight and NVIDIA, Qualcomm also unveiled an innovative XR over 5G demo experience, that could foreshadow sweeping changes in a number of industries.

Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 5G Based Headset Designs.

The demo features a wireless Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 5G-enabled reference design headset with six-degrees of freedom (6DoF), to enable a completely standalone, high-quality VR/AR experience. In the demo, users can configure and explore a range of Pagani vehicles, and experiment with various colors and interior trim options. The experience is enabled by the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 5G headset, which features advanced reprojection technologies to effectively reduce latency, augmented by high-quality graphics rendering on edge servers thats transmitted over a high speed 5G network.

And thats where Qualcomms partners come in. ZeroLight created the VR content thats rendered on the edge-cloud servers. That content is streamed to the Snapdragon XR2 reference design headset using NVIDIAs CloudXR platform and a 5G network connection.

We are now in the era of 5G which will transform how the world connects and communicates, said Brian Vogelsang, senior director of product management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. With distributed processing from boundless XR over 5G, XR will see one of the most dramatic 5G transformations. Industrial-level processing power will be available on-demand with ultra-reliable [connections] and low latencies, revolutionizing XRs potential for both the consumer and the enterprise.

Cloud-Rendered VR Over 5G.

We have had untethered, standalone HMDs (Head Mounted Displays) for a while now, but those platforms typically lack the compute and GPU resources to render graphically rich, high-fidelity XR applications in real-time. To date, high-performance PCs with powerful GPUs have been required to handle workloads like this, but by leveraging NVIDIAs CloudXR technology and the high-bandwidth / low-latency characteristics of 5G, the rendering workload is shifted to the edge cloud and the content streamed wirelessly to the standalone XR device. This technology eliminates the need for retail, commercial, or enterprise businesses to invest and maintain expensive, high-performance XR-Ready PCs, in favor of streaming content from the cloud, and the simplified configuration of a standalone headset.

While on the subject of XR headsets, Goertek has leveraged Qualcomms XR2 5G-based reference design to create a VR form factor that includes an IR emitter for hand tracking and head tracking with simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), 3D audio and voice commands, and 2Kx2K per-eye dual panel LCD support. The design also has embedded motion tracking technology from Atraxa, electromagnetic tracking technology from Northern Digital Inc. (NDI), and compatibility with embedded eye tracking from Tobii, which includes Tobii Spotlight Technology which uses foveated rendering to reduce the rendering workload.

The culmination of all of this technology could have far-reaching impact on everything from commercial retail to collaborative design applications and entertainment. Qualcomm wasnt specific in terms of when these solutions would be available from OEM and ODM partners, just that the platform will be made available sometime this year as the 5G roll-out continues to gain momentum.

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Qualcomm And Partners Unveil Worlds First Boundless XR Over 5G Experience For Commercial Retail Applications - Forbes