Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 VR Development Kit Launched

What better platform than the Game Developers Conference to launch your new virtual reality development kit? Qualcomm today announced the launch of its Snapdragon 845 processor-based virtual reality development kit. The SD845 is Qualcomm’s flagship mobile processor for this year and the VR development kit powered by it includes a standalone headset and a new software development kit or SDK.

This is a self-contained headset meaning that it doesn’t need to be hooked up to a PC to function. One doesn’t even need to use a smartphone as the display. Everything the headset needs to function is contained within the device and is meant to showcase the core features of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845-based VR system.

The new virtual reality development headset features a single 2560×1440 WQHD display which translates into a resolution of 1280×1440 per eye with a 60Hz refresh rate. It also features 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage.

It’s optimized for room-scale six degrees of freedom with “inside-out” simultaneous localization and mapping. All of this is achieved without having to rely on any external sensors, cables or wires.

Qualcomm Adreno Foveation is another core feature of this system. Fovea refers to the tendency of our eyes to observe only the significant details in a very small center of our field of vision. The concept of foveated rendering uses this understanding to improve performance and save power while improving visual quality.

Developers will be able to get their hands on the new virtual reality development kit from Qualcomm in the second quarter of this year.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Gadgets
Tags: Qualcomm, Virtual Reality (VR)