Qualcomm, Meta to Collaborate on Future VR Devices, IFA Told

Collaborations and partnerships were the hallmark of Friday’s opening IFA 2022 keynote by Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, who announced a multiyear agreement with Meta to jointly develop “custom products” leveraging Snapdragon XR chipsets for Meta’s Quest augmented- and virtual-reality platform. Qualcomm has "conviction" that the metaverse will be "the next computing platform, and eventually it's going to be as powerful and as big as the smartphone market," said Amon. Meta's hope "is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce and support jobs for millions of creators and developers,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg on prerecorded video. The “next phase” of Meta’s partnership with Qualcomm involves “a deeper engineering collaboration at a level that’s a first for both of us,” he said. “Unlike mobile phones, building VR brings novel multidimensional challenges in computing, cost and form factor,” said Zuckerberg. “We’re still at the early stages of the metaverse, and this sort of deep technical integration will help VR move towards being a multifunctional computing platform that will transform how we all connect.” Amon also brought Bose CEO Lila Snyder to the stage to discuss a “broadened collaboration” that will see Bose incorporate Qualcomm voice and music chipsets into future wearables, earbuds and other devices. When Amon asked Snyder to name her favorite Bose device, she answered that it's the product Bose plans for a global debut Wednesday, and that she couldn’t talk about it.