Qualcomm Joins AR Alliance to Drive Innovation in Augmented Reality

Qualcomm Technologies has joined the AR Alliance, becoming the last founding member of its board of directors. 

STMicroelectronics, META, Essilor Luxottica, Corning, Dispelix, Optofidelity, MICROOLED and Google also are founding board members. 

The AR Alliance provides a platform for organizations to collaborate on advancing augmented reality hardware development, focusing on creating AR wearables and devices that offer enriching user experiences.

Bharath Rajagopalan, AR Alliance chair and director of strategic marketing at STMicroelectronic,  said the founding members are driving AR together and that 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,” Rajagopalan said. 

“We are excited that Qualcomm Technologies has joined the alliance as they bring a key piece to the hardware ecosystem through enabling platforms for the development of applications, and with their years of experience in this space, their industry-leading technology and deep market experience.”

Qualcomm and culinary tech company Kittch have created AR-enabled glasses that can teach users how to cook. Unveiled at the 2023 Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, California, the collaboration uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform to bring AR capabilities to Kittch’s existing cooking app.

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Meta picked Qualcomm to power its virtual reality headsets in 2022, becoming the official chip supplier of Meta after the pair struck a multi-year agreement. 

It was not the first time the pair worked together. Meta’s consumer-level VR headsets, previously sold under the Oculus brand name, also use Qualcomm processors. The Quest headset uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 chipset.