Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said the collaboration announced last year by Samsung, Qualcomm and Google is developing mixed reality smart glasses that can connect to the wearer’s smartphone. “This will be a new product,” Amon told CNBC in a recent interview.
“What I really hope to get out of this partnership is that I want everyone with a phone to buy matching glasses to go with it,” Amon said. “I think we need to understand that the glasses have to do with wearing them. Regular eyeglasses or sunglasses are no different and then we can scale up.
Since the XR collaboration was announced in February 2023, there has been very little information about the project. It’s positioned as an affordable rival to Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro. Google also showed off a prototype AR glasses running its upcoming Project Astra multi-modal artificial intelligence assistant at its Google I/O event in May.
Amon told CNBC that he was “very satisfied” with the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses released last year, which are powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 chip, and said that generative artificial intelligence is the “missing ingredient” to expand the mixed reality market. “Artificial intelligence will run on the device. It will run in the cloud,” Amon said. “It’s going to run some in glass, some in phones, but ultimately, there’s going to be a whole new experience.”
