Qualcomm's "XR Enterprise Program" augmented reality ambitions

Many times, people's hopes for extended reality (XR) are too focused on a certain point. Providing a complete set of hardware, software, and solutions is not easy, but only the integration of these elements together, rather than any of the individual parts, can determine the success of XR. This is one of the reasons why people think that XR will find greater opportunities among enterprise customers. Companies such as Microsoft, RealWear, and Vuzix have established clear use cases and provide highly focused supporting solutions.

The challenge now is how to expand the market size of extended reality. It is not easy to adopt a focused support plan and push it to more vertical industries at a higher volume, while demonstrating its value and convincing customers to recognize its return on investment. CCS Insight said that the industry needs to adopt a more collaborative approach to truly drive the development of the XR market.

That’s why we were so excited to see Qualcomm announce a new industry program for XR at the Enterprise Wearable Technology Summit 2019. Qualcomm named the program “XR Enterprise Program”, which aims to create new virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality solutions based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR platform to promote the application of XR in manufacturing, energy, healthcare, aerospace, education, insurance, retail, transportation, construction, engineering and more industries.

To advance this initiative, Qualcomm has selected several companies as partners. These partners target enterprise customers and help them improve productivity through innovative developments in a wide range of applications. Applications range from assisting field workers in performing inspection, maintenance and repair tasks to office scenarios such as remote collaboration, data visualization and training.

Qualcomm's XR Enterprise Program is an exciting move for the XR industry, especially for enterprise customers. Virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality are highly anticipated and are seen as disruptive technologies in the enterprise field, each with significant advantages. Virtual reality is particularly useful for the design process, where it can help build and evaluate 3D models or place users in highly detailed virtual environments for training exercises.

Augmented reality is well suited to assisting manual tasks, such as maintenance and repair, because it can feed live video of the on-site worker to a remote assistant, and then digitally overlay instructions and help information onto the worker's heads-up display. Mixed reality is broader than augmented reality and virtual reality, blending the physical and virtual worlds together.

In the development of XR, continuous investment in software and hardware is required. Qualcomm announced that the purpose of the XR Enterprise Program is to establish a partner community that can jointly promote the development of XR. Qualcomm proposed that through the cooperation of multiple companies, the partner community can obtain more technical support, marketing promotion and joint marketing opportunities.

Many members of this new launch program are startups, and for them, the participation of a chip giant like Qualcomm is invaluable. It will ensure that manufacturers know about upcoming new features as early as possible, and developers can enjoy greater scale advantages by optimizing for Snapdragon platforms rather than other dedicated chips. This also makes porting easier, benefiting the entire ecosystem. A more formal program will also "match" partners to help them create solutions required for specific segments and specific applications.

So far, XR headsets in the enterprise space have not reached the stage of large-scale deployment. Although there have been a few large trials, reaching thousands of headsets in some applications, in general, it has not yet entered the large-scale deployment stage. There are many reasons for this, and the introduction of a new technology is never a natural process. However, achieving greater consistency across increasingly powerful devices, increased collaboration among partners, and easier reusable development will help make these headsets more useful, thereby accelerating and increasing their deployment.

Qualcomm is the industry leader in mobile XR, and its chipsets are unrivaled. Now, what it needs is a broader set of solutions and a stronger commitment to the enterprise market to increase its opportunities in the enterprise XR market.

The future of XR relies on tight integration of hardware and software, and the XR Enterprise Program is an important step in building this collaboration. We may not see the actual benefits of this program in the short term, but participants hope that it will promote cooperation within the community and pool resources to accelerate market opportunities that benefit all participants. As enterprise applications of XR begin to have clear interactive effects and utility, this program may become an important milestone in promoting the mass adoption of XR.