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Qualcomm is prepping to dive further into the mixed-reality race with a pair of smart glasses.
In a recent interview with CNBC, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon revealed that the chip maker, in partnership with Samsung and Google, is developing mixed-reality glasses that can be connected to a wearer's smartphone.
"It's going to be a new product; it's going to be new experiences," Amon told CNBC.
We got a sneak peek at this last year during Samsung's Galaxy S23 Unpacked event. At the time, Amon and Hiroshi Lockheimer, SVP of platforms and ecosystems at Google, touted the companies’ continued partnership and offered vague promises of new mixed-reality experiences.
“In XR, we're working to create a new era of highly immersive digital experiences that blur the lines between our physical and digital worlds,” Amon said last year.
On CNBC this week, Amon said Qualcomm is "incredibly pleased by the success" of the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, which run on Qualcomm's Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 platform. But the rollout of generative AI technology will make smart glasses "significantly more useful," he says.
"They are going to grow in popularity. They are going to scale," according to Amon, whose ultimate goal is to get everyone with a phone to "go buy companion glasses to go along with it."
The Qualcomm CEO had few details but suggested the Samsung/Google glasses will be lightweight. "I think we need to get to the point where the glasses are going to be no different than wearing regular glasses or sunglasses," he said. So, chances are, it's going to be more like a portable fashion accessory than a huge spatial computer like Apple's Vision Pro.
We may have gotten a first look during Google I/O in May. During a demo of Project Astra, a Google employee uses the AI agent to find her glasses and put them on. The phone view disappeared and seemed to be replaced by an AR view through the glasses themselves, with a display.