After its Snapdragon 820 became the crown jewel of the company, Qualcomm is now prepped to introduce its virtual reality software development kit (SDK) for Snapdragon-based smartphones and virtual reality headsets.
Qualcomm Wants To Gain A Decisive Lead In The VR Market
Before you ask, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 does not only deliver astounding levels of processing power, but the company has designed the SoC to be VR ready. According to the latest statistics, VR and augmented reality are expected to become a $120 billion business by 2020, according to the latest metrics from Digi-Capital. What this means is that future VR devices will be much more graphically impressive than current hardware, and with Qualcomm introducing its very own VR development kit for developers, software for developers will become easy to create.
Coming to what the SDK will provide developers; more access to advanced VR features will be given, and as a result, it will allow them to simplify development and attain significantly improved VR performance and power efficiency with Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 SoCs. These SoCs will provide the necessary firepower to tackle intensive graphics rendering display on not only smartphones, but the headsets in which they will be attached on.
Qualcomm was also kind enough to make the development kit free for developers and has also mentioned that it will be available during the second quarter of 2016 through the Qualcomm Developer Network. The added advantages of the SDK will aid in helping developers determining how to spread a processing workload across a bunch of processing cores in an efficient manner. The cores will also have their own dedicated functions to keep up with the motion sensors or else, the person experiencing virtual reality content will end up getting sick due to excessive strain.
According to Dave Durnil, who is senior director of engineering at Qualcomm, states how developers will be given additional freedom:
“We’re providing advanced tools and technologies to help developers significantly improve the visual user experience of next-generation virtual reality applications like games, 360 degree VR videos, and a variety of interactive education and entertainment applications. VR will be a new paradigm for how we interact with the world, and we’re excited to help mobile VR developers more efficiently deliver compelling and high-quality experiences on upcoming Snapdragon 820 VR-capable Android smartphones and headsets.”
In a separate report, we stated that Adreno 530 present inside Snapdragon 820 is the fastest GPU present inside mobile devices, so it will obviously have a competitive edge in rendering faster and more detailed visuals.
Qualcomm is expected to showcase its offerings at the Game Developers Conference this week on Samsung hardware so hopefully, we will get to know more about what the company has to offer to developers.
