Since the concept of the metaverse has been depressed, the "little spring" that AR has finally ushered in has suddenly come to an abrupt end. But even after a few ups and downs, AR is still an attractive project. Recently, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon revealed in an interview with the United States Consumer News and Business Channel that Qualcomm is working with Samsung and Google to develop mixed reality glasses.
Just when Meta next door announced that it would abandon its self-developed AR chip, Qualcomm CEO's statement can be said to be a shot in the arm for practitioners who still stick to this track. At Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked 2023 in February last year, Samsung, Google, and Qualcomm officially announced a collaboration to jointly develop mixed reality products. At that time, TM Roh, president of Samsung's mobile experience business, said in an interview that the three companies will play a similar role in the development of the mixed reality platform as in the existing Android ecosystem.
Now, the specific products of the mixed reality platform they worked together on have finally been revealed. According to Cristiano Amon, the product will be a mix of reality glasses that will be able to connect to smartphones, adding, "What I really hope to get out of this collaboration is that everyone who has a mobile phone will buy the matching glasses." ”
Using AR glasses as an accessory for smartphones is undoubtedly an overstatement by Cristiano Amon. I have to say that Qualcomm, Samsung and Google, as the top-level designers of the entire smartphone industry chain today, are indeed keenly aware of the biggest flaws of current AR glasses. Since the birth of Google Project Glass 12 years ago, AR glasses have not been able to become mainstream consumer electronics, simply because of the slow development of hardware technology.
Wearing AR glasses can cover a layer of virtual world in the real world, and optical display technology is undoubtedly the key. Compared with the previous prisms, curved reflections, and freeform surfaces, the current AR glasses use the optical waveguide based on the principle of "total reflection", which transmits light to the front of the eye and then releases it, and the Birdbath optical design that uses specular reflection to imaging, which can already create an excellent see-through effect, so that the virtual picture and reality are completely integrated, so that users are no longer so easy to "play".
It's just that the optical waveguide and Birdbath have the defect of high cost and low resolution, but this defect is not unbearable. However, AR hardware manufacturers have not yet been able to find a real reason to convince users and make them generous, which is the extreme lack of content ecology. In the past, AR hardware manufacturers were pursuing to re-follow the path of smartphones, that is, to build an ecosystem with AR glasses as the hardware platform.
However, unfortunately, due to the defects of AR glasses themselves at the hardware level, the corresponding developer ecology has never been able to grow. Even since 2016, the "first year of AR", after 8 years, the current AR application ecosystem can only be described as better than nothing. The application ecology of smartphones began with the App Store that came out in 2008, and 8 years later, in 2016, "Glory of Kings" was born.
In addition to watching videos with AR glasses, the only other entertainment experience is a number of casual games. The reality is that the current AR application ecosystem has encountered the same problems as Windows Phone back then, and developers do not lack development tools like ARKit and ARCore, but lack confidence. Due to the small audience size of AR hardware, the cost performance of developing AR applications is very low, which in turn makes users lack experience and makes the AR application ecosystem enter a death spiral.
For example,About#Catch up with the trend and buy AR glasses but can only eat ash#This topic, some netizens said,I bought Dream GlassAR glasses,The result is only dangbei market,And ant market and other software can't be installed,And all applications need to be charged。 In this way, after using it a few times, users will inevitably put the AR glasses on the shelf due to the lack of freshness.
This time, the solution proposed by Qualcomm, Samsung, and Google is a "detour". Since there is a lack of interest in being an AR application developer, it is better to directly use the mature smartphone application ecosystem. AR glasses are connected to smartphones, which means that AR glasses will retake the road of VR mobile phone boxes, which is to use AR glasses as a simple display screen, and the mobile phone will provide performance.
AR glasses are just used as a medium to display the output content of the phone, and this solution similar to cloud gaming does have some ideas. After all, smartphones are portable general-purpose computing devices that most people have never left, and the status quo of one per person means that AR glasses can enter the field of vision of consumers as accessories, and the computing power of smartphones is enough to support the rendering of augmented reality. In fact, Apple's Apple Vision Pro is a product of this line of thinking.