Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 Will Help Usher in the Next Wave of VR Experiences

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) has taken place throughout most of this week, hence the reason for all of Google’s ARCore talk, news about instant games on Google Play, etc. Qualcomm had a big announcement today too, and it involves VR. With their new Snapdragon 845 processor, Qualcomm wants to help take any pain out of developing for VR.

Their new VR kit is called the Snapdragon 845 Mobile VR Platform and it’ll help with the development of “truly immersive experiences.” Like with other Qualcomm development kits, the goal here is to make it easier than ever to build out related products. While I’m sure this kit could be used for building new VR headsets, Qualcomm said that they built this with software development in mind, as a way to get good hardware in the hands of VR experience makers.

With this Snapdragon 845 VR platform, developers will be able to create room-scale applications, thanks to its room-scale 6DoF SLAM (“six degrees of freedom with inside-out simultaneous localization mapping”). That’s a fancy way of saying that you’ll be able to walk around a room while in VR without wires or lazers.

This new VR kit also takes into account eye tracking, supports better visual performance by boosting the center field of vision, and supports a boundary system to help visualize real-world spatial contraints.

This new kit will be available in Q2 of this year.

// Qualcomm