Qualcomm presents dev kit for VR glasses with Snapdragon 835

Qualcomm has announced a VR headset development kit that includes a Snapdragon 835-soc, the company’s high-end processor. For hand tracking, Qualcomm has partnered with Leap Motion.

The Snapdragon VRDK, as Qualcomm calls the set, is intended for developers and consists of the VR glasses and a software development kit. The glasses themselves contain an AMOLED screen with a resolution of 2560×1440 pixels. On the outside are two monochrome 1-megapixel cameras with fisheye lenses that help with the 6DoF motion detection. The integrated gyroscope, accelerometer and compass also help.

The glasses contain two more cameras, which are intended for eye-tracking. This information can be used for foveated rendering, a graphic technique that ensures that the image the user is looking at can be rendered with higher quality. On the software front, a Snapdragon plug-in for Unity and the Epic Game Engine helps developers with this.

The head mounted display also has 4GB lpddr4 and 64GB flash storage. A trackpad is processed on the side and there is support for WiFi, Bluetooth, USB 3.1-c and the Qualcomm Aqstic audio codec. Concurrent with the announcement, Qualcomm announced a partnership with Leap Motion for hand tracking support. Leap Motion announced at the end of last year that it was developing a small sensor for VR glasses, with a field of view of 180×180 degrees.

Qualcomm hopes that other manufacturers will make their own VR glasses based on the standard of the Snapdragon VRDK. Last year, the company introduced a dev kit based on the Snapdragon 820.