I have been wearing Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses for a lot of time over the past year. I use them to easily record POVs Videos I’ve experienced In theme parks like Epic Universe, use technologies like Nintendo Switch 2. They are great, but the battery runs out and the camera may be better.
That may change soon. Qualcomm has just announced the latest smart glasses chip, which will launch products starting next year. It promises increased power efficiency, supports better cameras and even AI, and it will work offline on glasses without cloud connections.
The new AR1 Plus Gen 1 chip is an upgrade from a chip on smaller smart glasses like Meta Ray-Bans. It’s not a high-end AR glasses to project 3D images, but it’s likely to be the type of glasses that Google has shown recently at its developer conferences and on Meta’s next-generation Ray-Bans.
I talked with Ziad Asghar, director of XR at Qualcomm, about the news and what it means for glasses you might buy soon.
Smaller chips can use larger batteries
The meta-ray coils I wear these days look like real glasses, just slightly short and chunky glasses. Asghar emphasizes that the new chip is 20% smaller. For example, this will help future smart glasses look more like regular glasses, for example, thinner frames.
“If I had to make it fit into the glass,” Asgar told me the chip, “I need to make this dimension really small.”
The tiny chip also leaves more battery capacity. Despite the smaller size of the new chip, the power efficiency of the new chip will actually increase by 5%. It doesn’t sound like much, but Asghar also sees a future shift to more glass processing on phones, which will also contribute to battery life. Currently, devices such as Meta Ray-Bans use cloud processing for AI.
Qualcomm’s new chip may make the next wave of glasses smaller.
There is more AI, even offline space
“The real difference now is AI,” Asgar said of the current state of smart glasses. “I keep saying that, but I really believe that this will help the XR use case than any other space.”
One of the new tricks that Qualcomm’s new chips can do is to run device AI with small language models, allowing it to do more offline things through voice commands. Qualcomm showed some of these demos at the Augmented World Expo conference in Long Beach, California, and I’m attending, so I’m going to share ideas on how it works.
Meta Ray-Bans can use voice commands to take photos and take photos offline, but future voice skills for glasses may be more extended. Want to exercise, play music, etc.
“The device also has the role of a standalone device. Not only does it always link or tie to another device or tie to the cloud. And I think that will open up a lot of scenarios.”
Better cameras with lower light, sports
The photos and videos taken by Meta Ray-Bans are better than you expected, but the video quality is wide and sometimes I’m still a little nervous when I move. Asgar said the new chip will improve camera and image stability.
“Suppose you sit in the restaurant at night, dimly in the restaurant, and I’m in front of me trying to translate the menu. That’s what we’re working hard on, how to improve low-light capabilities.” Asgar also said that the camera stabilization is more suitable for videos and photos.
I asked if the zoom function could be given to glasses like this, which might require a display inside the glass, which is what these chips support. Asghar points out that digital cropping is an option, and may even be based on compelling scaling controls in the future.
Samsung Galaxy rings are not suitable for glasses yet, but Qualcomm’s ring and glasses demonstration will eventually.
Using wearable rings, external hockey is better
Smart glasses are building deeper relationships with our phones and other wearables, and Qualcomm has become a player in all of these spaces: it is also one of its key partners with Android Xr from Google. Asghar believes watches are part of wearable gears that will soon be used with glasses, but he thinks he sees greater potential in today’s rings like Rings.
“You can essentially use a ring and you can use it very carefully,” he said.
Upcoming glasses can use their own processed hockey. Xreal uses ice hockey for its first experimental Android XR device. Halo Projectand Meta’s demo has been done for its concept Orion glasses. Part of the appeal of the hockey puck is that it can make glasses more easily now working within the range of their phones and their OS (basically Android and iOS).
“The greatness of glasses is that it provides our cloud players with a path to bring their AI and LLM and agents to consumers,” Asgar said. “Not every cloud player has a smartphone asset.”
Pucks may indicate that while Android XR has now been announced as a future bridge to AR and VR devices, it will take some time for Google to figure out how the phone-to-glass link actually works. Meanwhile, Apple simply doesn’t enable support for any integrated smart glasses for iOS, at least beyond a single app outside of a single app accessed from Siri and deeper phones.
Battery life is still a problem
I can use rays for up to more than half a day before I need to charge. Asghar acknowledges that glasses currently have battery life issues, but says some solutions can pop up. This new chip may not have much battery life, but more phones handle or connected pucks may help.
“Now, the batteries are mostly on one side. We know people are thinking about basically doubling the battery, with dual-cell batteries on both glasses legs to increase capacity,” he said. “Or maybe they could come up with an interesting design that could replace the battery.”
That’s not even a glasses?
AI Leader Openai bought Jony Ive’s hardware company, which is developing some kind of AI device that may be based on pendants instead of sitting on your face or being able to sit on a table. It is entirely possible that the camera-based AI wearables and other failed wearables Humane people’s sales It will come, too. Asghar acknowledged that Qualcomm’s processors may end up using devices other than glasses.
“That’s a big part, right?” he told me. “People will really try the form. [XR] The space has not been resolved. An AI proxy device can be smart glasses. It can also be something inside you. ”
But Asgar knows that everything has to raise the bar better than the failure of AI devices in the past. “There was a big failure. People really had high expectations for products like this. They needed to run and they needed to run well.” And hopefully lasted for more than a few hours.
