Qualcomm Technologies, a major provider of communications and semiconductor components for portable devices, has joined the Augmented Reality (AR) Alliance to promote industry collaboration, growth, and development, the latter announced on Wednesday.

By joining the Alliance, the company will help the extended reality (XR) industry expand and innovate AR ecosystems, it explained.

In addition to Qualcomm, the AR Alliance includes founding members Meta Platforms, Corning, Essilor Luxottica, Google, STMicroelectronics, Dispelix, MICROOLED, and Optofidelity.

Dr Bharath Rajagopalan, Chair and Director of Strategic Marketing, said in a statement,

“The promise of AR and its potential industry are so vast that there is ample room for all our member companies to work together. The AR Alliance is the place where concrete work takes place to harmonize approaches for advancing, unifying, and growing the global AR supply chain and accelerating innovation.”

Qualcomm’s entry into the Alliance can offer “a key piece to the hardware ecosystem,” enabling companies to develop applications for their platforms. Also, Qualcomm will contribute its many years of experience, technologies, and “deep market experience,” he continued.

Echoing Rajagopalan’s statement, Said Bakadir, Senior Director and Product Managment, Qualcomm, explained how the enterprise’s Snapdragon XR Platform empowered hardware and ecosystem developers.

Concluding, he said,

“We look forward to contributing our experience and expertise alongside the members of the AR Alliance to help grow the augmented reality space.”

Qualcomm has remained a longstanding leader in architectural development via its Snapdragon XR series of solutions.

In addition to leading the market with its Snapdragon smartphone and portable device processors, mixed reality headsets such as The Meta Quest, Pico, and HTC VIVE family of headsets leverage Qualcomm’s compute capabilities. Google and Samsung will reportedly use Snapdragon processors for future headsets as well.

Additionally, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon AR2 platform aims to transform the smart glasses industry by offering hardware developers an all-in-one processing platform for compute, software development and testing, and deployment, among other services.

Building Alliances Worldwide

To date, there are a growing number of coalitions supporting and facilitating the global development of emerging technologies.

Some of the most important ones include:

• AI Allliance: Launched by Meta Platforms and IBM, the AI Alliance aims to build an open community of responsible developers using scientific, secure, and transparent standards under a single ecosystem.
• Metaverse Standards Forum: Working with the Kronos Group, Meta Platforms, Google, Huawei, Nokia, NVIDIA, Samsung, Siemens and countless others, the Metaverse Standards Forum aims to build an interoperable, open Metaverse collaboratively and transparently.
• XR Association: Based in Washington, DC, the XR Association (XRA) builds best practices, interoperability, and innovation across the XR community, leading to growing solution ecosystems for developers, hardware engineers, and end users. Qualcomm, Meta, Google, Microsoft, HTC VIVE, and others are members.
• Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Association (VRARA): With a massive network of around 50 global chapters, the VRARA promotes XR-based international standards, initiatives, solutions, and scientific theory. Many of the big names in spatial computing, including companies, thought leaders, researchers, and organisations have joined the Association to grow its membership and initiate discourse.
• Secure AI Framework (SAIF): This initiative consists of a coalition of members like Amazon, Anthropic, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, and others that are working together to build ‘responsible’ artificial intelligence solutions worldwide.

Like this article? Be sure to like, share, and subscribe for all the latest updates from D×M!