The era of cheaper, standalone mobile virtual reality headsets is almost here, as VR makers preparing to release less costly displays based on mobile technology. Today, chipmaker Qualcomm Technologies Inc. announced the company’s most recent VR reference platform based on the company’s flagship mobile chip, the Snapdragon 845.

Right now, VR hardware is expensive. Most tethered headsets such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive cost between $400 and $800 and can require $2,000 computers. And mobile headsets, such as Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream, use smartphones that cost upward of a thousand dollars themselves.

That’s all changing now that standalone headsets have been announced from VR developers such as Facebook Inc. with Oculus Go, expected to sell at about $199, and HTC Corp. with Vive Focus, on sale now in China. These headsets are powered by Qualcomm’s previous VR chips — the Go runs on Qualcomm’s 821 and the Focus uses the Snapdragon 835 — so the platform, and its underlying chip, are both aimed at next-generation devices.

With this new Mobile VR reference platform, developers and head-mounted display makers will be able to take better advantage of the Snapdragon 845’s capabilities to deliver a superior VR experience on standalone headsets and mixed-reality devices.

“With the Snapdragon 845 Mobile VR Platform, we’re supporting the next wave of smartphone and standalone VR headsets for our customers and developers to create the immersive applications and experiences of the future,” said Hugo Swart, head of the virtual and augmented reality business group at Qualcomm.

The Snapdragon 845 platform uses Qualcomm’s latest visual processing system, called the Adreno 630. This system provides 30 percent faster graphics performance and 30 percent better power efficiency – something for which mobile devices running on batteries are constantly starved — compared with the previous chip generation with the Snapdragon 835 Mobile Platform. The system also provides more than double the display throughput, allowing for 2,400-by-2,400 pixels delivered per eye at 120 frames per second.

The new platform will also deliver another VR innovation on-chip called Adreno Foveation. The technology combines graphics rendering with eye tracking in order to reduce graphics processing load by only displaying fine details where the user is physically looking. Since the human eye can discern high detail only in a very narrow area at the very center of the gaze, this technique can be used to ease rendering power needs.

Qualcomm is also building a special spatial processing unit onto the platform with a dedicated Hexagon digital signal processor to provide body and motion tracking at room scale. That means hardware and software can take advantage of full six-degrees-of-freedom tracking for head movements as well as understand the users’ orientation in a room. That allows VR software to allow users to walk around when in VR and traverse a room and avoid colliding with anything in a way that adds dimensionality and depth to any VR application.

Such tracking is important not just for VR experiences but also for augmented reality applications. They require a sense of where things such as floors, ceilings and furniture are in relation to the user so virtual objects can be placed appropriately.

For the industry’s part, Facebook and HTC both intend to make use of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 in future devices, but it’s hard to say if they’ll appear in 2018. The industry trend toward cheaper but still powerful VR headsets and devices could be a huge boost for the AR and VR market, which saw a record-breaking $3 billion in funding during 2017. Although the AR and VR ecosystem has seen slow growth, held back somewhat by limited content, there are good reasons to believe 2018 will see substantial mainstream adoption.

“The Snapdragon Mobile VR Platform lends itself to the highest possible level of performance to meet the high computing demands of the standalone VR product category,” said Ash Jhaveri, vice president of business development at Oculus and Facebook.

Analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy agreed with Jhaveri: “The 845 is far and above the best chip for a mobile VR headset, even eclipsing the performance of some tethered solutions.”

Michael Inouye, principal analyst at ABI Research, added that Qualcomm is targeting the critical elements to give standalone VR the best opportunity to help expand the market, which he said could use a boost. “Tethered VR had some successes in 2017 but that came largely on the heels of significant price cuts – which came sooner than we had anticipated,” he said. “Standalone VR has a natural position between mobile VR and tethered VR, but it should push closer to the latter if it hopes to succeed as a new market segment.”

Inouye said Qualcomm’s push to develop for the AR and VR market is helping drive it forward, but it will be up to developers and services to support these efforts and shape the growth in the market. “We view 2018 as an important year for standalone VR,” Inouye said. “We’ll get our best vision yet into the potential for this class of VR HMD, but we’ll also see what impact it has on content providers as well.”

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 Mobile VR Platform is part of what the company has dubbed “Xtended Reality,” or XR, an umbrella term that encompasses efforts by Qualcomm to enhance both AR and VR capabilities in mobile devices. According to the company, this platform has helped launch more than 20 XR-capable head-mounted displays and smartphones.

Image: Qualcomm