Qualcomm’s big augmented reality project with Samsung and Google is… glasses

The partnership announced by Samsung, Qualcomm, and Google last year is developing a pair of mixed reality smart glasses that link to the wearer’s smartphone, according to Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon. “It’s going to be a new product,” Amon told CNBC News in a recent interview.

“What I really expect to come out of this partnership, I want everyone that has a phone to go buy companion glasses to go along with it,” said Amon. “I think we need to get to the point that the glasses are going to be no different than wearing a regular glasses or sunglasses. And then with that, we can get scale.”

Information about the project has been extremely slim since the XR partnership was announced back in February 2023. While the companies never specified what type of device they were working on, most rumors suggested it would be a Samsung mixed-reality headset pitched as an affordable competitor to Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro. Google has also teased a pair of prototype AR glasses running its upcoming Project Astra multimodal AI assistant at the Google I/O event in May.

Amon tells CNBC he’s “incredibly pleased” with the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses released last year, which are powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 chip, and that generative AI was the “ingredient that was missing” for expansion in the mixed-reality market. “AI is going to run on the device. It’s going to run on the cloud,” said Amon. “It’s going to run some in the glass, some in the phone, but at the end of the day, there’s going to be whole new experiences.”