HAWAII—Do you need glasses? Not AR or VR glasses—we'll get there—but the usual prescription kind, the ones that make your wobbly, fuzzy vision sharp. Putting Qualcomm's XR2 VR system on, when you've previously tried the Oculus Quest or phone-based virtual reality, feels like wearing glasses for the first time: Everything's finally sharp.

I tried the XR2 with Spatial, a company that does virtual reality conferencing and collaboration. So far, that's the most exciting use I've seen for VR. Running Spatial puts you in a virtual world with avatars of the people you're working with, where you can create and manage virtual objects and talk about them. For instance, if you're planning a store display, you can build it, walk around it, and alter it with your coworkers.

Spatial runs on a bunch of platforms. On Oculus Quest there's a wobbly indistinctness to a lot of text in the virtual world. It's fine for chatting with people, but when you get to whiteboarding, well, you need glasses. Microsoft's HoloLens 2 is super sharp, but with a limited field of vision that means you might miss someone waving at you from the corner of your eye.

The XR2 solves all that. The virtual world is crystal clear, with small text readable and objects realistically sharp, thanks to the XR2's 3K-per-eye display resolution. As a mixed AR/VR system, you get a full field of view.

The prototype I used doesn't have all of the XR2's promised features. It's hot and heavy, like most standalone VR headsets. It doesn't have the pass-through video that would let a full-view VR headset act like an AR one. It also doesn't have the seven cameras that would let the system do accurate hand and mouth tracking. The latter could fix one of Spatial's spookier flaws, which is that the avatar's faces don't move in sync with what they're saying. With the HoloLens, you can grab virtual objects and move them around just using your hands; once the XR2's additional cameras come into play, you should be able to do that with XR2-based systems as well.

I've never been a big fan of VR gaming or 360-degree video viewing; they both feel gimmicky, and like they've been tried and failed. But VR collaboration really offers something tactile and useful, whether it's for purely business reasons or in a more social context. Spatial's app (along with what Niantic plans with augmented reality Pokemon Go and Harry Potter titles) could be killer.

There's a lot of potential here and a lot of distance to go before it's realized. The XR2 chipset runs smooth, sharp virtual experiences without having to lean on a PC for rendering. Now we need to see it get into an actual retail headset that can deliver on its promise.