It had been reported (but not by us) that Qualcomm was building a VR headset, following a showing of a prototype at the Game Developers Conference in March. This is not the case: Qualcomm has confirmed that it is not making a head-mounted display (HMD), and does not intend to. The model on show was a prototype that “may” become a reference design.
The unit uses a 6.2″ AMOLED display with 2560 x 1600 (16 x 10) resolution. The display uses Qualcomm’s TruPalette colour gamut mapping and enhancement software, and Qualcomm EcoPix for compression and a variable refresh rate. A Snapdragon 820 SoC runs the device, with an Adreno 530 GPU (conformant with the Vulkan API); 360° UltraHD HEVC decoding and display at 60fps; and a Kryo CPU with a custom 64-bit architecture.
As well as the ‘standard’ sensors (i.e. gyroscope, accelerometer), the headset features a magnetometer and sensors for temperature, humidity, RGB and ambient light. It runs on a 3,020mAh battery and has micro-HDMI 2.0 and micro-USB 3.0 connectors.
Analyst Comment
That size of display produces a ppi of around 483 ppi. That’s still a long way short of the 800ppi OLED for headsets that Samsung Display showed in its suite at CES. (BR)
