Qualcomm is No More Just a Chip Provider! Metaverse is in Radar

Qualcomm and Meta together announced a partnership to deliver multi-generation metaverse experiences

Qualcomm, the giant chip provider trades billions of its chips into a variety of smartphones and IoT devices. But over the past few years, Qualcomm has also been widely moving to become a platform provider that not only develops chips but also provides more complete solutions by developing a significant amount of software and services to make those chips adaptable to specific markets, as well as partners with a wide array of important infrastructure players.

Perhaps its most observable platform play presently is the Qualcomm Drive Platform. It provides a wide array of functions in cars and eventually autonomous vehicles – from infotainment to drive train components to all-important connectivity. Qualcomm has developed partnerships with almost all major players in vehicle manufacturing, as well as with many infrastructure-enabling companies. And while deployments in cars take a long time from the start of engineering until it comes to customers, Qualcomm is well on its way to being a key player that will benefit for an extended period.

Enlarging its platform play, Qualcomm has recently planned to address the emerging Metaverse world. Its primary focus is now to build out a Mixed Reality (XR) platform to tribute the work it has done for several years in AR/VR. It has revealed its partnership with almost all big major players in AR/VR (such as Microsoft and Meta) delivering purpose-built chips and has also been working with the ecosystem to define and upgrade the necessary peripherals to convert this into a reality. At IFA 2022 in Berlin, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and social media giant Meta Platforms, Inc. announced a multi-year agreement to collaborate on a new era of spatial computing powered by Snapdragon extended reality (XR) platforms and technologies for the Meta Quest platform. The companies came together to work on cutting-edge virtual reality (VR) innovations for more than seven years, most newly with Meta Quest 2, and this agreement coagulates the mutual commitment to dispatch multiple generations of premium devices and experiences powered by custom VR platforms in the coming years.

"By partnering with Meta, we are bringing together two of the world's metaverse leaders to revolutionize the future of computing for billions of people in the coming years," stated Cristiano Amon, president, and chief executive officer, of Qualcomm Incorporated. He added, "Building off our joint leadership in XR, this agreement will allow our companies to deliver best-in-class devices and experiences to transform how we work, play, learn, create and connect in a fully realized metaverse." Mark Zuckerberg, Founder, and CEO, of Meta, said "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," He further said "As we continue to build more upgraded capabilities and experiences for virtual and augmented reality, it has become very important to build specialized technologies to power our future VR headsets and other devices. Unlike mobile phones, building virtual reality brings novel, multi-dimensional challenges in spatial computing, cost, and form factor. These chipsets will help us keep pushing virtual reality to its limits and deliver awesome experiences."

Snapdragon Spaces is Qualcomm's XR platform play. More than just hardware and software, it aims to create innovation in the XR market. An industry standard like Open XR exhibits some of that but is not adequate. In any new market, many smaller players build out their unique solutions building the market into a very fragmented place. Qualcomm has an objective of limiting fragmentation in the market with Spaces by creating a single ecosystem for developers that establishes a center of gravity. By creating its open and horizontal platform, Qualcomm aims to reduce this fragmentation and accelerate adoption and standardization. Currently, device companies can't build their ecosystem given their relatively limited scale, so Spaces can fill that void by leveraging technology across many devices. No doubt, Qualcomm also believes it can achieve valuable market presence and ultimately revenue streams by doing so, but this doesn't negate the advantage that this effort brings to the marketplace.

Qualcomm has generated an XR toolkit SDK and ecosystem for Snapdragon XR

development, including reference designs and component supplier partnerships. While it has been developing some of its perception technologies (including voice, visual, movement, and more), it has also created partnerships with third parties to build more capability into the Spaces platform. XR is not an easy technology to solve given the character of augmented and virtual worlds interacting with humans in the real world. And Qualcomm understands it can't do so on its own.