With the smartphone market flat this year, Qualcomm is trying to prepare for the next big thing. In its view, that's standalone AR/VR headsets, so the company today launched the Snapdragon XR1, its first chipset made for these devices.

Qualcomm thinks there will be 186 million standalone AR/VR headsets sold through 2023, and that the top problem consumers have right now is that headsets are too expensive. So it developed the XR1 by paring away extra bits from what sounds a lot like a Snapdragon 710-ish chipset, to make headsets cheaper and easier to build.

"We strongly believe that standalone devices are going to help guide the future," said Hiren Bhinde, director of XR product management for Qualcomm.

Qualcomm is being slippery about the XR1's capabilities, though. The chipset appears to be designed like a smartphone chipset, just without an integrated LTE modem. It supports 2K LCD or OLED displays and 4K60 content with "jitter reduction," along with low-latency surround sound, speech recognition, and natural language processing.

But Qualcomm wouldn't tell us anything about how fast it is, or which other Snapdragons it could most easily be compared to, except to say that it's less powerful than the Snapdragon 835 and 845.

"There might be some parts of the chipset that might not be quite at the processing capabilities that the 835 and 845 need to be," Bhinde said.

Wait a minute, you say—do we want AR/VR experiences that are less powerful than last year's smartphones, or than the Lenovo Mirage Solo? (The Oculus Go headset has a less-powerful Snapdragon 821 processor, which might be more on par with the XR1.) Bhinde says yes: the XR1 will focus on surround-entertainment experiences, like 360 video or watching Netflix on a "big screen," which don't require extreme interactivity or complicated controllers.

The point here appears to be to get adequate AR/VR performance at very low price points—the $200 or so that would cause broad VR adoption and get application developers really excited.

But there's a risk there, which Qualcomm is playing down. The company says it can provide good, fun AR/VR experiences with less processor power. The XR1 promises the sort of stuff in existing Google Daydream and Gear VR headsets, basically, without newer tricks like room-scale wandering and hand-tracking. But VR in those forms hasn't grabbed a lot of imaginations. Qualcomm is betting that the problem was that it wasn't cheap enough, but they're risking their product falling flat if the problem was just that it wasn't good enough.

The Snapdragon XR1 will appear in products from Meta, Pico, HTC Vive, and Vuzix, Qualcomm said. The company wouldn't promise any dates, but Bhinde said "the hope is that we'll see something by Q4 2018."