Meta just launched the Quest Pro at $1,499, a mixed reality headset with full-color passthrough, eye tracking, and face tracking, aimed at productivity and collaboration rather than gaming. In the same month, ByteDance’s Pico shipped the Pico 4 in Europe and Asia for roughly $430, which means Meta no longer has a standalone VR monopoly. And Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1 at Snapdragon Summit: a platform built specifically for lightweight AR glasses, with a distributed architecture that splits the main processor and coprocessor into two modules so the glasses can be thin enough to wear all day.
The AR glasses get their own chip
Snapdragon Insider bias declared: the AR2 is the thing I am most excited about here. Qualcomm is designing silicon for a form factor that does not exist at scale yet, and that kind of forward bet is exactly the kind I respect. The distributed architecture, main processor in one module and coprocessor in the other, solves the heat and weight problem that has been blocking all-day wearable AR. This is the chip that makes lightweight smart glasses viable if someone builds the right hardware around it.
The trend for the year ahead
Mixed reality passthrough is the new frontier for headsets, and AR glasses are getting their own silicon. Expect the VR/AR/MR terminology to keep blurring as everything converges into one device that does both: replace your surroundings and annotate them.
The Quest Pro is too expensive for most people and the passthrough is grainy, but the direction is right. The AR2 is the more interesting play. Whoever cracks all-day comfortable AR glasses wins the next computing platform.
Part of Two Decades of XR, my running diary of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality.