Qualcomm Announces the Snapdragon 835 Virtual Reality Development Kit

Virtual Reality is still a young and booming market even though it seems a lot of hype has died around it. It's not talked about in every other headline anymore, but we're still seeing some big companies investing in VR as a future content source for their products. This is most noticeable with Samsung and Google with their mobile VR platforms, but some are still investing in VR for sports, entertainment, gaming and a few other key areas. Qualcomm wants to be at the heart of VR with the Snapdragon 835 SoC and the company is working to help ease the transition for content creators.

Yesterday, Qualcomm announced the virtual reality development kit for their Snapdragon 835 mobile platform. This will give developers early access to a VR head mounted display (also known as an HMD) with the Snapdragon 835 inside it. This virtual reality development kit (also known as a VRDK) is supported by an upgraded VR software development kit that works with the head mounted display. This VRDK not only gives developers early access to the head mounted display, but it also offers them some tools to take advantage of it.

These tools will allow developers to quickly and easily bring their games and applications to the platform. The specs of this head mounted display include a four megapixel (2560×1440) WQHD AMOLED display (two megapixels per eye), 6 degrees of freedom (6DoF) motion tracking, 2 monochromatic VGA global shutter cameras for eye tracking, 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 64GB of UFS storage, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and USB3.1 type C (for power), Qualcomm Aqstic™ audio codec (WCD9335) and a trackpad on the right side of the unit.

It's also using data from gyroscopes and accelerometers in the Snapdragon Sensor Core and predicting your head position with the Qualcomm Hexagon DSP. Foveated rendering is used to sense the user's gaze direction and then focuses on that object to maximize performance. It will also support 3D binocular vision with color correction and barrel distortion with stereoscopic rendering with lens correction technology. Be sure to check out the full press release if you're interested as Qualcomm is packing a lot of technology in these dev kits.

The VRDK is expected to be available in the second quarter of 2017 through the Qualcomm Developer Network.

Source: Qualcomm

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