Deutsche Telekom said it will support the further development of Qualcomm's open XR developer platform Snapdragon Spaces. Deutsche Telekom's tech incubator, hubraum, and the T-Mobile Accelerator in the US will launch new XR programs. Startups, creatives and developers are invited to work with mentors from the corporations to develop and test applications on Snapdragon Spaces.
With Snapdragon Spaces, Qualcomm intends to open up the extended reality (XR) environment by taking a horizontal, open channel approach. Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile US help Qualcomm to commercialize XR development.
The Snapdragon Spaces XR Developer Platform is a headworn AR developer kit to enable the creation of immersive experiences. Snapdragon Spaces is in early access with select developers and is expected to be generally available in the spring of 2022, Qualcomm said.
The platform provides environmental and user understanding capabilities that give developers the tools to create headworn AR experiences that can sense and intelligently interact with the user and adapt to their physical indoor spaces. The offering is based on Qualcomm's acquisition of the team and certain technology assets from HINS SAS and its subsidiary Clay AIR, a provider of hand tracking and gesture recognition systems. In addition, Qualcomm Technologies recently acquired the AR technology provider Wikitude, which already works with over 150,000 registered developers.
First products in 2022
Hardware partners for Snapdragon Spaces include Lenovo, Motorola, Oppo and Xiaomi, with products expected in 2022. The Lenovo ThinkReality A3 smart glasses paired with a Motorola smartphone will be the first to commercialize Snapdragon Spaces. In addition to DT and T-Mobile, Qualcomm is also working with Japanese operator NTT Docomo on the project, and the company expects more global operators to be announced later. The operators will help scale and bring AR glasses tethered to smartphones supporting Snapdragon Spaces to commercialization starting next year.
