Qualcomm: Enabling the XR Industry

Brad Scoggin
[We got a chance] to sit down with Brian Vogelsang. Brian is the senior director of product management in the XR division at Qualcomm. Brian’s been at Qualcomm for 30 years. Brian, it’s great to have you on the show.

Brian Vogelsang
Awesome to be here.

Brad Scoggin
I was thinking, I think I met you initially, like two a weeks ago. and then it’s funny, we have this little kind of funny thing between us that we have running into each other in Vegas. Several times. It feels like we’re both big Vegas guys, and I don’t know that either of us really are, but it feels like it. Yeah, we’ve seen each other there 3 or 4 times. It’s just kind of funny. But I’d love to hear, maybe just as we kind of jump in, I want to hear more about kind of the evolution of XR at Qualcomm. But before we go there, I think a lot of our listeners, it’s funny, we all know the name Qualcomm, but maybe just at a high level, like what does Qualcomm do?

Brian Vogelsang
Yeah. So, Qualcomm is best known as being a technology company. Maybe more well- known in building chips for a variety of devices. So we build the platforms that power the chipsets that power smartphones and laptops and tablets and wearable devices like smartwatches, as well as XR devices. So we’ll spend more time talking about those today.

But we’re also in the automotive world. So we build software and technology for self-driving cars and digital cockpits and chipsets that power next generation automobiles, audio devices like Bluetooth headsets, and smart speakers and camera systems and smart home devices, internet of things, that sort of thing. So you can think of us as a technology provider, and we build on the enabling technologies that make all these kind of smart devices in our world possible.

Brad Scoggin
Gotta love that. And so tell us about you’ve been to 30 years, been in XR for seven. I love to hear even a little bit of the origin story of XR within Qualcomm.

Brian Vogelsang
Yeah. So early, if we kind of go back to 2015, 2016 Qualcomm was building XR devices in the, in the smartphone space. So if you’re familiar with like AR Kit in our core smartphone AR, back in the early days going back 15 years ago, we were doing research and development about how you could bring augmented reality to mobile devices.

And we had a number of products there that primarily enable developers to build on, on smartphones, but those naturally kind of went into thinking about headsets could, could we use the processors that we have and use for mobile today and put them in wearable, augmented reality and worked with some of the early pioneers in that space, like ODG to build augmented reality glasses, leveraging our smartphone portfolio.

And then we, we really started thinking about virtual reality in, in like 2014, 2015. And we said, well, why do virtual reality headsets have to have a PC that they’re tethered to with applications running there? Why do they have all these tracker systems that have to be installed to use those devices?

So why couldn’t we just make an all-in-one kind of standalone virtual reality headset that didn’t require any external thing? And so we were helped pioneer that space and bring those to market beginning in 2016, 2017. And that’s just evolved from there to the current generation of headsets. And now that’s the primary way that people experience virtual and now mixed reality devices.

We’ve continued it. I’m going to add reality. So it was a thing we started back in 2013, 2014 for head-worn devices and still continue to this day with with much more modern headsets. So the virtual and mixed reality market has moved to a little bit faster. We’ve seen wider consumer adoption, wider enterprise adoption of these devices, but it’s a mix so we’re still focused on enabling both categories.

Brad Scoggin
Yeah. From my perspective, it feels like for years everyone has said AR is ultimately going to be [prominent]. But everything we see on the ground is VR, VR. Do you have an opinion on that?

Brian Vogelsang
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I do believe that that the ultimate form factor that we all want to be in is in augmented reality, an experience that we can wear all day, that’s all day wearable, that’s lightweight. There’s just really significant challenges in making that possible to have all day wearables. You really need to be at 30g, 50g – in that range. And technologically, the amount of tech you need to put in a glass to make it possible – these are displays and objects and sensors and processing and that sort of thing. It’s just something we’re working to miniaturize and working to build a technology that can get us there. So what we’ve seen in the interim is larger devices.

So you think of the HoloLens 2 or the Magic Leap devices or the A3 from Lenovo, These are a little bit bigger augmented reality headsets, let’s say between 130g to 400g. And then on the VR side, initially virtual reality was all about fully immersed, and more recently in the market in the last couple of years, we’ve put cameras on the front of these virtual reality headsets and passed the real world through.

And now you can do augmented reality in a VR headset, using this pass-through technology. And that’s what we see big growth in now. So now you’re not just fully immersed in the digital world. You can turn those cameras on your VR headset and be in this pass-through modality where now you can do augmented reality as well.

So, it’s a little bit challenging because the industry refers to these with a lot of different terms, everything from spatial computing to reality to mixed reality. We talk about it as a mixed reality experience when you’re in VR in kind of an AR mode. We talk about this more as mixed reality.

Brad Scoggin
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And I mean, pretty much every standalone XR device on the planet as a Qualcomm chip. Is that, right? I mean, that’s how I always say it.

Brian Vogelsang
Yeah. We’ve been investing a long time and we have made sort of significant progress in enabling the industry. I think over 80 devices have launched using Qualcomm. So it’s not every device but almost.

Brad Scoggin
Yeah. Like you say almost. And so an OEM, whether it’s an XR specific OEM or if it’s somebody like Lenovo, they come to you, they get a chip, they get a reference design. Like what all do they get?

Brian Vogelsang
Yeah. Yeah. So Qualcomm’s really about enabling industries. I talked earlier about whether it’s mobile phones that we’re enabling or smartwatches or automotive devices, we want to give the people building those devices, the manufacturers, everything they need to get to market really rapidly. So in the case of an XR device, that’s the chipset itself. So those processors include a bunch of different things. They’re kind of like systems on chip. So they have GPUs, they have computer vision, they have AI elements in them, and we assemble them all together into a single chip. So those chips are really important and a big part of what we build. But then in the case of XR, on top of the chip, we enable a bunch of software and algorithms. These XR devices need to be able to track the user, track their hands, or track their eyes, or track their location in the room as you’re walking around with a VR headset / AR headset, you want to be able to move freely. And those tracking technologies, whether it’s a controller or whether it’s hands or positional tracking, those things need to be built and typically the device manufacturer isn’t going to have the time or the resources to be able to build these software and algorithms.

Well, so we build those. We also make them highly power efficient. So we make them, we’ll put them in the hardware so that they run really efficiently. So we have more battery life on a device that is standalone. We take this software and algorithms and we put them into reference designs. You mentioned the reference is really important for market acceleration. So we give the OEMs a blueprint. That blueprint includes a VR device that we’ve kind of built. You can think of it like a concept car or a blueprint. And it has all the sensors and these algorithms integrated with the chipset. So everything kind of works together. So now they can get to market much more quickly.

They don’t have to invest in building all these things. Then the last thing that we do is we enable these algorithms together as a platform for the OEM that can be exposed to a developer or an ISV who wants to use this. So if I want to bring an application, let’s say it’s a training application for the enterprise. I want to build that. I need to be able to have access to all these tracking technologies, tracking the controllers, tracking the eyes, tracking the hands, the position or anchoring content in any environment. And all those algorithms need to be available in Unity or Unreal Engine to a developer building those experiences. And so we bring all that together in a platform.

We bring all of this together in a platform we call Snapdragon Spaces. That’s essentially the turnkey thing we provide as a software package we provide to an OEM, a device manufacturer, to give them everything they need on the algorithm side. And it all is compatible with the reference design, compatible with our chipsets, hardware optimized. And then we also provide access to Snapdragon Spaces for the developer community.

The ISVs who are creating these training solutions can build for these devices as well. The OEMs don’t have to create the SDK. They don’t have to create the environment that developers are going to build in. We deliver that to the OEM.

Brad Scoggin
One of the things that I’ve really appreciated about working with Qualcomm is that, I mean, we look at the world and we look at our role in it, [which is to] remove the friction. And obviously we’re doing it from the device management side. So how do we more efficiently provision devices, manage devices at scale, manage the users, manage content, etc.? And so I think as we’ve seen spaces evolve over the last several years and all the stuff you just listed to us, it’s just so exciting because we see first-hand on a daily basis of power of XR and it feels like we have each have our list of things. Why is this going faster? But it’s just a different list of different friction points, really. Right? I mean the technology has been proven, the efficacy has been proven. And so I look at spaces and to me it helps OEMs get to market quicker, like you said, which I think is very powerful. So whether it’s XR-specific OEMs or one of the traditional OEMs, on the ISV side, I think that’s really powerful to enable an ISV to be able to build once for multiple devices because of the cost that, right, the time cost, money cost, etc.. but I love to hear [that] you kind of went through a kind of a feature set of spaces, which is really cool.

But what you didn’t say is you were really part of birthing spaces. So what was the origin of that? What was the impetus seven years ago or four years ago? And where do you see it going from here?

Brian Vogelsang
Sure. Yeah. So I think, like you said, our goal is accelerating the market. We want to help device manufacturers get to market more quickly. What we realized in XR that’s unique versus other technology areas is that the whole device [hast to] think about spatial computing. The computer is about computing in the real world, and you’re embodied in that. So that means the computer has to know you don’t have a keyboard or a mouse to input. And then the displays are not a monitor. They display is the contents being displayed in a virtual world or in the real world. And so, that means that the XR device needs to have, all these technologies that understand the real world, understand the environment of the real world, understand the user in order for the user to input and output the basic things in computing.

And so that’s a much more challenging thing for an OEM or device manufacturer or a developer to deal with if it’s not standardized. If you have inconsistent experience. Let’s say I’m a developer or an ISV and I’m building a device or using an application for training that really requires hand tracking and, if I want to put this application on multiple devices and that hand tracking either doesn’t exist on one device or it works and functions completely differently, then that’s just, like you said, creating friction for that ISV, which is going to create friction for them.

Selling the training solution is just going to create scaling problems. So we kind of early on saw that, hey, if an ISV or a developer creating an application for an industry doesn’t have a consistent experience across different hardware, then that’s just going to be a bottleneck for the industry. How do we solve that problem? Well, one way is to try and standardize how these APIs and applications function on the device. And so a big part of that is open XR. So there’s an industry organization called Khronos. And within that there’s a project called Open XR. And Qualcomm is one of the founding members of this this part of this project. And the goal here is to create industry standards around APIs that developers can use to run their applications and experiences on these devices. So it’s about removing friction. So from the beginning we were involved in open XR, but open XR is just interfaces. It’s not the actual technologies themselves, the algorithms that track your hands or your eyes or controllers and so we wanted consistency of those as well. Otherwise you get this kind of developer fragmentation across devices. And so that’s really what we set out to solve was we were building these algorithms. We’re exposing them through industry standards like Open XR up to an ISV in Unity or in Unreal Engine. And those are our app portability. We wanted applications to be able to run consistently across devices.

Brian Vogelsang
And so that’s what we set out to solve with Snapdragon Spaces. So it’s kind of a turnkey package we give to the OEM. The OEM can load that onto their device. And now they don’t have to worry about reinventing how the how the hand tracking our algorithm works, that sort of thing. And it’s all pre integrated with the sensors that are in the reference designs.

So if they follow the blueprint and bring it to market they can get to market rapidly. And when that device is there in the market now always applications are already ready for it because they’ve been built for another Spaces device. Now they can just come onto that device. So it’s really about de-fragmenting for the developer.

And we saw that early on that “hey, if this problem is not solved, we’re going to we’re not going to be able to grow the market like we want to grow it. We’re not going to have a rich ecosystem of manufacturers that are out there that can create devices that can scale, and then that’s going to hold back industry adoption.” So that’s really why we set out to do this in 2019, 2020. And then we launched Spaces in 2021 late 2021.

Will Stackable
You talked about some of the challenges for ISV fees. What challenges do you hear when it comes to scaling for the enterprise?

Brian Vogelsang
Yeah, yeah. So I think there are a few: one of them is the problem that you all solve. ArborXR is the managing the device fleet. That’s certainly one. So how to give the tools to it to be able to get these devices in the hands of their end-users and manage the fleet in a way that’s secure and can also deploy the applications that the enterprise is going to need to be successful. So that’s certainly an important one. Training the IT departments and understanding how to deal with these devices, they’re different. I’ve been at Qualcomm for 30 years. I actually I saw the phones and smartphones introduced in the enterprise for the first time and this was a challenge.

But if you, if you go back to the early 2000s, it seems funny now, but cameras were put into phones. This is prior to smartphones, even, and enterprises didn’t know how to deal with that. They didn’t know how to deal with managing feature phones prior to smartphones. And, and so these were a new technology that’s pervasive.

And, in the enterprise, that creates value. It’s there’early in the early days, there’s a little bit of friction getting people to understand how to work with that technology. And understand how to deploy it and how to manage it at scale. So I think those are some of the things, other things are—there’s really a diverse set of things you can do with XR if you’re looking at VMware device or augmented reality, just so many problems.

It solves so many use cases and oftentimes the ROI around those use cases are specific to a part of the enterprise, whether it’s like a learning development team or whether it’s a broader field service organization. So the enterprises have to understand the technology itself, how to deploy it and scale it.

But then they also have to understand how can it be applied and how do I educate not just the AI teams on the technologies, but how do they educate their customers within their business units to understand the value that this this brings? So these are things that, when you have a new technology or a new new platform, a new way of computing, it’s going to take some time for that to understanding to be realized by the entire organization. So those are some of the challenges that we see.

Brad Scoggin
Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think what’s interesting too is the state of XR in the enterprise space. And because you have this future technology, but oftentimes you have ISV is really operating as an MSP to get the pilot off the ground doing the legwork. But it’s because we’re all so committed. We’ve seen the power; we’ve seen the results.

And I think one thing we talk about — and I always preface this with I know this sounds dramatic – but I really think that XR is enabling a learning revolution. I think it’s just fundamentally changing the way people learn, the speed at which people learn, the amount of information they can retain. But even just democratizing access when you can train to be a nurse in your living room it’s I mean, it’s really powerful.

And so one of the things we like to always encourage people to do is just stay committed. We’re on the front edge. It’s still really, really early. And there’s enough results that if we can just hold on to this, I think we’re going to we’re going to see something really exciting come out of this.

I love to hear any, any successes that come to mind when you think about spaces and you think about, I mean, it’s just really interesting your journey. So you’ve launched in 21. So I guess three years now. and, and in that time, how much the space has evolved. So, yeah. Any, any successes that you that come to mind with spaces.

Brian Vogelsang
Yeah. So like I said, we launched in late, late 2021, and in the span of two and a half years, we started the Space which really focused more on augmented reality and then expanded to include virtual and mixed reality headsets. So we’re really about OEM enablement and – one of the key OEMs that we’ve been working closely with – that’s enterprise-focused Lenovo.

So Lenovo, we worked with both on augmented reality and virtual reality – their augmented reality devices [which are] a pair of glasses are about 130g that tether to a smartphone and enable AR-based experiences. So this will be like guided work instruction or a remote mentor or collaboration. Team collaboration. The more of the types of use-cases you might find on the HoloLens or Magic Leap. And then more recently, we’ve been working with them over the past year or so on the VR X. So the VR X is an all in one, standalone virtual reality headset built for enterprise running our XR 2 Gen 1, processor and that is a full virtual mixed reality experience.

So it has the pass through technology. I was talking about where you can see the real world when you’re in the VR headset and run your experiences with the cameras – sort of on it. And you can also go fully immersive on it. So on the enterprise side, that has been a big focus for us. But we’re working a number of other OEMs that have built space-based devices – commercialized – and we have others that are kind of along the way. [There are] a couple that I could highlight. One is Sony. So you may have seen Sony’s recent announcement at CES, and they’re building a virtual mixed reality headset that is for really targeted enterprise and content creators that are focused on 3D workflows. It’s a very high end device. It’s got, in the in the XR space, one of the things that we talk about is the display resolution, 4K versus 3K versus 2.5K per eye because there’s typically two displays and you add them together and you get the total resolution.

And this is one of the highest resolution ones. It’s a 4K like an Apple Vision Pro, if you’re familiar with that device, so that kind of resolution. But actually in the industry, we talk about how many pixels you can have per degree of field of view.

And this is even higher end. It’s, like, 55 pixels per degree. It’s very, very impressive, high end device. And they’ve got a really unique design – the controllers, they’ve got a ring controller and an interesting controller that doesn’t look like anything else we’ve seen in the VR space. because they’re targeting content creators in this kind of PLM and 3D CAD space.

And they actually customized some of the input devices specifically for them. And they’re working with Siemens on a platform for that. So the Sony device is really excited about that one – getting 4K enterprise mixed reality headset. On the AR side, there’s a pair of glasses that are coming from for enterprise from a company called, entity called Q devices.

Brian Vogelsang
So this is NTT DOCOMO, the, mobile operator, the largest operator in Japan, has built a new company called Qonoq devices together with sharp, and they’re building an AR glass. And this area of glass is enterprise-focused. It’s kind of wireless connection to the smartphone. So it’ll be powered by a smartphone connected to them and they’re lighter weight and focused on some of those use cases I talked about – remote work or moments or guided work instruction and that kind of thing.

We’ve got another 12 – 15 devices in the pipeline that I can’t, unfortunately, talk about them because they haven’t been announced yet. But there’s just a whole lot coming, again, from a diverse group of manufacturers. And so we’re just really excited about the investments that’s being that they’ve been putting to XR.

And we think that going to be many options for enterprises to choose from on the hardware side, as this market continues to evolve.

Brad Scoggin
So you just you prove my opening statement that almost every headset on the planet is using the Qualcomm chip, which I think is exciting. As we move to wrap, though, I love to hear from a 30-year Qualcomm expert, where is this technology going? And maybe even just personally what are you excited about with XR in the next 5 to 10 years.

Brian Vogelsang
Yeah. So XR, just like mobile was in the early days, is going through rapid, rapid iteration and technology advancement. So just watching the market in the last 2 or 3 years, the introduction of mixed reality, the advancements that are being made in the displays and optics space… I mean, if you look at five years ago if you put a VR headset, a standalone, a standalone VR headset on the change that we’ve had and the resolution and the quality of the image and the control and the inputs that we have – we had no real integrated hand tracking or great wireless controllers, that sort of thing. So just that every year we’re seeing, like these significant advancements in technologies, I am super excited about machine learning and AI and what that’s going to bring to the space. Qualcomm is making tremendous advanced in augmented reality. Our latest our latest chip for XR has over nine times the AR performance of the previous chip. And so we’re really investing heavily in that capability to run AI locally on the device that we’re like kind of at the edge. So I think this is going to not only help this AI capability is not only going to help devices become smaller and lighter weight, but more sophisticated in terms of their ability to do these perception capabilities, like the tracking, but – also – that’ll be exposed to developers and ISVs so they can take advantage of these AI hardware features to build more amazing things. We think about multimodal AI and using your voice to interact and as a sort of user interface to be able to manipulate content or ask the device to do something that you need it to do, and then it figures out how to do that and either return that as audio or return that in 3D.

So I think I’m really excited about just the advancements that are happening, how fast that’s moving and what that’s going to mean for creators and ISVs building for this next generation of hardware.

Brad Scoggin
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It is. I think sometimes we all, we we all get a little bummed at the speed at which XR is advancing, but the reality is things if you go back, like you said, five years, you think where we are today and you think where it could be five years from now maybe we’re, being a bit pessimistic.

Brad Scoggin
So that’s very true. And we work with a lot of ISVs and a lot of ISV [work] on the soft skills. And you think about how I could play into that, even with some of the conversational things like that and training. it is really, really exciting.

Will Stackable
And then you need speed for that. You don’t want to be waiting for.

Brad Scoggin
Yeah. That’s, this can be an awkward conversation if you don’t have [that]. Yeah. well, Brian, this has been great. I know you are busy so we really appreciate you sitting down with us today. And where can people find you? LinkedIn. Is that the best place if you want to connect?

Brian Vogelsang
Yeah, definitely can connect on LinkedIn. Send me an email.

Brad Scoggin
Okay. Awesome. Brian. Appreciate it. look forward to seeing you soon.

Brian Vogelsang
Yeah. Thanks, Brad. Thanks Will.