Qualcomm Technologies Inc introduces Snapdragon Spaces™ XR Developer Platform, a headworn Augmented Reality (AR) developer kit to enable the creation of immersive experiences that seamlessly blur the lines between our physical and digital realities. With proven technology and an open, cross-device horizontal platform and ecosystem, Snapdragon Spaces delivers the tools to bring developers’ ideas to life and revolutionise the possibilities of headworn AR.
Snapdragon Spaces is in early access with select developers and is expected to be generally available in the Spring of 2022.
Proven Technology and Innovation
Qualcomm Technologies is a pioneer in Augmented Reality with over a decade of AR research and development. Utilising these years of innovation and expertise, Snapdragon Spaces offers robust machine perception technology that is optimised for performance and low power for the next generation of AR glasses. The Snapdragon Spaces platform provides environmental and user understanding capabilities that give developers the tools to create headworn AR experiences that can sense and intelligently interact with the user and adapt to their physical indoor spaces. Some of the marquee environmental understanding features include spatial mapping and meshing, occlusion, plane detection, object and image recognition and tracking, local anchors and persistence, and scene understanding. The user understanding machine perception features include positional tracking and hand tracking.
Qualcomm Technologies has acquired the team and certain technology assets from HINS SAS and its wholly owned subsidiary, Clay AIR Inc, a provider of hand tracking and gesture recognition solutions, which allows developers the ability to create interactive experiences that have natural and intuitive user interactions with their hands.
To continue to drive AR technology innovation, Qualcomm Technologies has welcomed Wikitude, a world-class AR technology provider to the Qualcomm family. With the launch of Snapdragon Spaces, the existing community of 150K+ registered Wikitude™ AR developers can join us in accelerating the transition from smartphone to headworn AR.
Open Cross-device Platform and Ecosystem
Reducing development and commercialisation friction for the developer is at the heart of Snapdragon Spaces. The platform takes a direct-to-consumer approach that allows developers to build immersive applications for AR glasses and make them accessible to end users leveraging existing smartphone digital distribution stores globally. Snapdragon Spaces includes software developer kits (SDKs) for leading 3D Engines, including Epic Games’ Unreal Engine so developers can create experiences using familiar 3D tools and workflows like Unreal’s real-time 3D creation tool for photoreal visuals and immersive experience. Niantic Inc's Lightship developer platform, launched this week, will integrate with Snapdragon Spaces to enable developers to create planet-scale AR experiences. The Lightship Platform will expand reach to outdoor headworn use cases and inspire people to explore outside, and to connect and play with others in real time through multi-player functions. This builds on the ongoing collaboration to create a reference design for AR headsets to accelerate AR software and hardware development. The Snapdragon Spaces platform also supports app portability and unified workflows with Unity AR Foundation and Unity MARS, enabling developers on the platform to create experiences that fully integrate with the real world. Snapdragon Spaces is based on the Khronos® OpenXR™ specification to enable application portability and is the first headworn AR platform optimised for AR Glasses tethered to smartphones with an OpenXR conformant runtime.
Leading smartphone and AR hardware OEMs including Lenovo, Motorola, OPPO, and Xiaomi are initial partners to support Snapdragon Spaces in 2022, with the Lenovo ThinkReality A3 smart glasses paired with a Motorola Smartphone as the first to commercialize Snapdragon Spaces. Qualcomm Technologies is also working with an ecosystem of global operators, including Deutsche Telekom, NTT DOCOMO, INC. and T-Mobile US, with more global operators to be announced later. The operators will help scale and bring AR glasses tethered to smartphones supporting Snapdragon Spaces to commercialization starting next year. To help fuel innovation and application development in the US and Europe, both T-Mobile US and Deutsche Telekom will support Snapdragon Spaces with their T-Mobile Accelerator innovation programs for developers of tech incubator hubraum.
Developer-first AR Platform
Snapdragon Spaces enables developers to build 3D applications for AR glasses from scratch or simply add headworn AR features to existing Android smartphone applications to drive a unified, multi-screen experience between the smartphone screen in 2D and the real world in 3D. Developers will also receive a robust resource library that includes documentation, sample code, tutorials, knowledge bases, and tools to help accelerate their development. Snapdragon Spaces is in early access with innovative AR developers including Felix & Paul Studios, holo|one, Overlay, Scope AR, TRIPP, Tiny Rebel Games, NZXR, forwARdgame, Resolution Games, and Trigger Global.
Launching today is the Snapdragon Spaces™ Pathfinder Program, designed to support AR innovators through early access to platform technology, project funding, co-marketing and promotion, and hardware development kits to help grow an active community of Snapdragon Spaces developers. Interested developers can learn more and apply to the program by visiting the Snapdragon Spaces product page .
“The Snapdragon Spaces XR Developer Platform underscores our commitment to empowering developers to explore bravely and create confidently, paving the way to a new frontier of spatial computing,” said Hugo Swart, vice president and general manager of XR, Qualcomm Technologies Inc. “Snapdragon Spaces is designed to support the democratisation of XR by taking a horizontal, open channel approach so developers can rapidly bring their ideas to life and reach a wide range of end users. We welcome developers to join us in this journey to reimagine reality.”
Snapdragon and Snapdragon Spaces are trademarks or registered trademarks of Qualcomm Incorporated.
Snapdragon Spaces is a product of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.
LENOVO and THINKREALITY are trademarks of Lenovo. MOTOROLA, the Stylized M Logo, MOTO and the MOTO family of marks are trademarks of Motorola Trademark Holdings, LLC.
Snapdragon Spaces is based on a published Khronos® Specification and has been submitted to, and expected to pass, the Khronos Conformance Process. Current conformance status can be found at www.khronos.org/conformance.