The “facial computing” era is slowly becoming less of a trendy gadget for “glassholes.” Qualcomm is promising to power the next slate of camera-filled XR headsets and AR glasses with the Snapdragon Reality Elite, a new chip designed, of course, to put AI right in front of your eyes.
There are enough AR glasses available now that we have to make a distinction between “optical see-through”—aka just a freaking pair of glasses—and “video see-through,” which refers to the video passthrough you get through devices like the Samsung Galaxy XR or the Apple Vision Pro. Qualcomm built the Snapdragon Reality Elite chip to power both use cases, though a pair of “extended reality” glasses will naturally have to rely on external devices to power all that “augmented reality” goodness. Snapdragon Reality Elite is technically a sequel to the chipmaker’s previous Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 found inside devices like the aforementioned Galaxy XR. This time around, Qualcomm promises a significant 60% boost in Adreno GPU performance and a 30% uptick in Kyro CPU capabilities. In addition, the new chip supports 4.4K resolution, per eye, and a maximum refresh rate of 90Hz. Alongside the improved performance, Qualcomm claims we’ll see 20% better battery life than we got from its past-gen chip. That compute puck—powered by Snapdragon Reality Elite—is what makes the Project Aura glasses sing. © Xreal The chip also supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing and promises a 10% reduction in photon-to-photon latency—in other words, the time it takes for an image to beam itself to the displays in front of users’ eyes. The chip supports up to 12 on-device cameras, which are necessary for larger XR headsets, though a pair of glasses will use far fewer sensors (and two cameras may already be two too many).
