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Samsung's next big thing in XR is mixed-reality smart glasses
- Qualcomm’s CEO Cristiano Amon has revealed that Samsung’s upcoming XR product is mixed reality smart glasses.
- The smart glasses will link to the user’s smartphone.
- Amon says that AI will partially run on the device while the rest runs on the phone.
Last year, Samsung teased an XR project that it had partnered with Qualcomm and Google for. The tech giant never elaborated on what kind of wearable this XR device would be, but now Qualcomm has let the cat out of the bag.
While speaking to CNBC, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon revealed that Samsung’s formerly nebulous upcoming XR product is a pair of mixed reality smart glasses. Previously, rumors suggested that the product would be a headset; there had even leaked images of a headset prototype. The CEO added that these smart glasses would link to your phone and it’ll be “a new product.”
Amon went on to say:
What I really expect to come out of this partnership, I want everyone that has a phone to go buy companion glasses to go along with it. I think we need to get to the point that the glasses are going to be no different than wearing regular glasses or sunglasses. And then with that, we can get scale.
Additionally, it appears that the smart glasses will be equipped with AI running on the cloud. “AI is going to run on the device. It’s going to run on the cloud,” Amon said. “It’s going to run some in the glass, some in the phone, but at the end of the day, there’s going to be whole new experiences.”
The question remains, could these smart glasses be the same device we saw during the Project Astra demo at Google I/O? Not much is known about Samsung’s XR project at the moment, outside of the fact it will run on Android and have a Snapdragon XR2 Plus Gen 2 chip. At Galaxy Unpacked, Samsung’s TM Roh teased its new XR platform would come out this year.