Snapdragon Spaces: bridging the gap between smartphone apps and XR apps

VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality) have been at the forefront of development for years, with major tech companies and startups working on building their own XR software and hardware.

However, the problem was the relatively sporadic nature of this development. This space required an overarching platform that could be used by different companies and developers to build products and apps based on a single ecosystem, much like what we see in the Android world. This is where Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. It keeps pace with Snapdragon Spaces technology and provides a simple and convenient way for developers to jump into the world of XR! This is what you need to know.

What is XR?

Before jumping into all the exciting features of Snapdragon Spaces, let’s talk about XR (augmented reality), which is a term that encompasses VR, AR, and MR (mixed reality).

VR and AR are better known. In the former, you find yourself in a fully computerized space, with accompanying hardware that allows you to interact with objects in the virtual world. AR, on the other hand, brings the real world into the mix, with a transparent screen that lets you see everything in physical space, with augmented projections that add information and details to enhance the experience.

Finally, there is the MR, which combines the best of both worlds. It is also completely computer generated, but takes images from the real world and combines them in a VR environment to create a mixed reality.

While there are three distinct types of augmented reality, they all fall under the general heading of XR.

Qualcomm leads the way with Snapdragon Spaces

Snapdragon Spaces is brought to you by Qualcomm, truly at the forefront of the XR space. We already have products that use Qualcomms XR processors, most recently the Meta Quest 3 with the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 platform and the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses series powered by the Snapdragon AR1 platform. While the chips are essential, they give you the processing power and energy efficiency to run different reality environments that Qualcomm wants to do much more than just build processors.

On the hardware side, Qualcomm is helping to create reference devices, which partners can use to rapidly prototype and build commercially available products. At the same time, developers can use hardware development kits to test their applications. These hardware kits offer more than just processing power. In addition to a powerful CPU and GPU, they also include sensors and other technologies for connectivity, hand motion tracking, aircraft detection, and everything else needed to build and use XR apps.

And of course, Qualcomm’s involvement does not end with hardware. Snapdragon Spaces is a software development kit that developers can use to build XR apps for a variety of products, from wearables to smartphones. It was initially only used by Qualcomms partners to develop their own headsets, but now, the company has opened it up to all manufacturers. Qualcomm is fully involved in scaling the ecosystem, providing developers with software support, updates, new features, and everything else they need to build XR apps.

If you’re a developer interested in building XR apps for a variety of headsets that use Snapdragon Spaces, support Qualcomms processors, or run Android, the Snapdragon Spaces SDK is just what you need.

Snapdragon Spaces makes it easy to create XR apps

Getting started in a technology space that is still in its early stages can be daunting. As a developer interested in XR, you may worry about starting with low-level libraries and building things from scratch.

But Snapdragon Spaces uses Unreal Engine or Unity, tools used by hundreds of thousands of developers around the world to produce 3D games. And since you can now use any of them to create XR apps, you don’t need to relearn all the tools or start from scratch.

In Snapdragon Spaces SDR for Unreal Engine or Unity, there are various technologies that you can use such as anchor points, hand tracking, object tracking, plane detection, etc. Anchor points allow you to track a specific point in space, so you know exactly where it is in a virtual, augmented or hybrid 3D environment. An essential aspect of any XR world, hand tracking allows you to track what your hands or controllers are doing and interacting within the space.

There’s also image or object tracking and plane detection, which is especially useful for augmented reality and mixed reality settings. Considering the physical 3D environment, images can be projected onto flat, horizontal or vertical spaces, and you can do a lot of things around it, from modeling objects to playing games.

Importantly, this is all built into the SDK and made available to developers in their tool of choice. This means you can spend your time being creative when building XR apps instead of worrying about building lower-level base support software. You can trust the SDK to handle it all and focus on your inspiration to build something great.

A fantastic new feature: fusion with dual rendering

That being said, Qualcomm is heavily involved in ecosystem support and scalability, which means new features! One of the newest additions to the SDK is called Dual Render Fusion.

Many current-generation headsets use a combination of a headset and an Android smartphone, connected either wired or wirelessly. With this setup, the secondary device, a smartphone, can do much of the heavy lifting in terms of processing power, making for lighter, slimmer, and more comfortable headsets.

By combining dual rendering, you can now add a second display instead of using a secondary device to process it. As a developer, you now have two screens that you can use to display something on your Android smartphone and headset.

What’s really cool is that this also acts as a stepping stone from a regular smartphone 3D app to an XR app that can be viewed on a headset. You can add a second page and transfer the features of your smartphone app or app to the XR environment with this extra feature instead of rebuilding an XR app from scratch.

For example, if you’re playing a game on your smartphone and you’re using an augmented reality headset, you can view additional information from the game, such as your inventory or game stats, on your headset while you continue playing on your phone. Get. The reverse is also true, where your headset is the home screen and additional details and information appear on your smartphone. All of this can be done without having to redevelop the game specifically for AR or MR.

The combination of dual rendering gives developers an easy way to jump from smartphone apps to XR apps without starting from scratch.

Jump to XR with Snapdragon Spaces

Often, with any new technology space, it is difficult to bridge the gap between hardware and software due to lack of support. How do you create an application for hardware that is not readily available? Or when the hardware is available, developers don’t have a software platform to build apps for.

Qualcomm solves this problem by solving it from both sides. Snapdragon Spaces gives you a standard way to develop apps for XR, using existing 3D tools like Unreal Engine or Unity and includes essential features like plane detection, object tracking, hand tracking and more to help avoid the learning curve. Inclined. There are also fantastic new features being added all the time, like dual-rendering compositing, which lets you jump from smartphone apps to XR apps without having to recreate anything from scratch.

And there’s an array of devices you can test on, from existing hardware reference devices from Qualcomm to Snapdragon Spaces-ready Android smartphones like the OnePlus 11. This really bridges the gap between software and hardware, enabling developers to reach their full potential. We jump. Check out the XR plans.

Sponsored by Qualcomm Technologies.