Qualcomm announced the XR2 virtual reality platform at its Snapdragon Summit in December, but now the company is revealing a new reference design for the chipset. The design was built by electronics company Goertek, and shows off a number of the chipset’s capabilities — including support for up to seven cameras.
The headset itself looks like previous-generation VR headsets, but it offers a whole lot more performance under the hood. Notably, the headset supports 5G connectivity, along with two times the CPU and GPU performance, four times the video bandwidth, and six times the resolution of headsets powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 mixed reality platform.
While Qualcomm has shipped the XR1 VR platform, the Snapdragon 835 is more widely used in real-world headsets.
When it comes to resolution, the reference design offers one 2K display per eye though the XR2 platform is technically able to support resolutions of up to 3K per eye.
Perhaps the most important feature on offer by the headset is 5G connectivity. 5G and virtual reality are often associated with each other, because of the fact that with 5G, headsets could offload some of the processing, helping make them more portable and lighter.
At this stage the reference design is expected to be available for select partners in the coming months that is, companies that are doing interesting stuff with AR and VR and want a top level platform to showcase their work. However, it does demonstrate what’s on the horizon for XR, and what consumers will eventually be able to get their hands on.
