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The partners say they will work together to develop premium metaverse experiences, with Meta’s Meta Quest platform leveraging Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chip’s extended reality (XR) capabilities
This week, Meta and Qualcomm have announced a new multi-year partnership focussing on the creating customer chipsets for Meta’s Quest virtual reality (VR) platform.
The partners say they will work together to create new chips using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platforms, specifically optimised for XR devices.
“As we continue to build more advanced capabilities and experiences for virtual and augmented reality, it has become more important to build specialized technologies to power our future VR headsets and other devices. Unlike mobile phones, building virtual reality brings novel, multi-dimensional challenges in spatial computing, cost, and form factor. These chipsets will help us keep pushing virtual reality to its limits and deliver awesome experiences,” said Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg.
“We are still in the early stages of the metaverse and this sort of deep technical integration will help VR move towards being a multifunctional computing platform,” he added.
Qualcomm and Meta have had a partnership in the VR space for around seven years, with the semiconductor specialists’ chips being an integral part of Meta’s various VR headsets, including its latest Quest 2 set.
Now, this new deal will see that partnership taken one step further, creating what Meta hopes will be the foundation upon which the elusive metaverse will ultimately be built.
“Building off our joint leadership in XR, this agreement will allow our companies to deliver best-in-class devices and experiences to transform how we work, play, learn, create and connect in a fully realized metaverse,” explained Cristiano Amon, president and chief executive officer of Qualcomm.
Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
It is worth noting that, in recent years, Meta has been moving towards creating its own custom silicon for its XR and metaverse creations, though progress here has seemingly been slow. Earlier this year, for example, Meta decided to go with Qualcomm’s technology rather than their own chip, Brasilia, for its launch of the second generation of Ray Ban Stories smartglasses.
Ultimately, it seems that Meta does not quite have the in-house semiconductor expertise it needs just yet and, with Zuckerberg banking the entire future of Meta on the success of the still-amorphous metaverse, it makes sense for the company to lean on tried-and-tested partners like Qualcomm to hopefully make the metaverse materialise.
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