Qualcomm Bolsters Its VR HMD Accelerator Program With New ‘Critical’ Components

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to meet with Qualcomm’s Hugo Swart in Taipei, and it didn’t take long before I could see that he is a man that’s truly passionate about the future of VR, as well as AR. At that time, he spoke about XR (eXtended reality) – a merging of AR and VR devices – but it appears that’s not all he had to talk about to wrap up the first half of the year.

At the VR World Conference held in Shanghai, Swart today announced a bolstering of Qualcomm’s HAP, short for Head Mounted Display Accelerator Program. With this program, Qualcomm enables vendors to gain easier access to designs and parts to accelerate (as the name says) their development.

What’s new is that three key components have been added to the HAP. The first is a chip from Bosch (BMX055) which acts as an absolute orientation sensor; the second is OmniVision’s OV9282, a 720p high-speed image sensor for feature tracking; and the third is Ximmerse’s Flip, a controller optimized for low latency drift-free tracking.

Qualcomm’s HAP is more than just a prototype, says Swart. There’s a lot of work behind the scenes to not just find the best components for a job, but source them. In a new blog post, he writes that HAP is “offering a detailed reference design that allows manufacturers to apply their own customizations while utilizing our engineering, design, and experience in VR. The reference design is engineered to minimize software changes, hardware issues, and key component validation.”

With HAP, there’s no doubt that Qualcomm is helping to accelerate the production of mobile VR, which bodes great things for the future of the ecosystem. This winter, Lenovo will be launching a standalone headset based on Qualcomm’s designs, while HTC will follow-suit “later this year”.