Qualcomm has unveiled a new virtual reality reference platform based on the company’s powerful Snapdragon 845 Mobile Platform. Debuting at the Snapdragon Tech Summit in December, the platform features a variety of new architectures and subsystems engineered to deliver experiences that blur the lines between the physical and virtual worlds, Qualcomm said. It will build on the success of its predecessor, which powered VR devices at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show. A continued relationship with GoerTek also allows for global manufacturers to build commercial designs based on the new platform.
The Snapdragon 845 Mobile Platform uses the company’s latest Adreno 630 visual processing subsystem which offers integrated graphics, video and display processing technologies. Meanwhile, Adreno Foveation combines graphics rendering with eye-tracking, to direct graphics resources towards where the user is physically looking.
Roomscale offers the ability to track the body and location within a room so you can freely walk around the virtual environment without cables or separate room sensors, which the company claims is a first for mobile standalone devices. Much of this is processed on the company’s new, dedicated Hexagon DSP and Adreno GPU within the Snapdragon 845. Qualcomm Technologies’ reference designs have supported some of the first wave of standalone VR devices from ecosystem leaders like Google Daydream, Oculus and Vive.
