SAN FRANCISCO—Qualcomm's bread and butter is still smartphones, but the mobile chip giant wants to connect a whole lot more than just the devices we carry in our pockets. There's a whole world of computing systems and sensor platforms living on the "edge of the network," and the company that shipped nearly 750 million mobile chipsets last year wants a big chunk of that market as well.
The good news for Qualcomm is that much of the marriage of computing and connectivity that's currently going on in the enormous technology field we've dubbed the Internet of Things (IoT) is squarely in their area of expertise, according to CEO Steve Mollenkopf.
"It's amazing the amount of tech that's being absorbed from the mobile ecosystem. Computing and connectivity, what we do, we are now expanding that into a lot of other areas, including consumer electronics, education, healthcare, energy, networking, cloud services, and more," Mollenkopf said, kicking off Qualcomm's Uplinq developer conference here.
In a freewheeling opening keynote, Mollenkopf and others demonstrated IoT technologies ranging from robots to toy-recognition applications for tablets to a new SDK for digital eyewear.
Take robotics, an area that few would associate with Qualcomm at the moment. Yet in Mollenkopf's telling, a "drone is basically a smartphone with four DC motors," so it makes sense that the company is currently developing platforms for airborne and land-based robots.
At Uplinq, Qualcomm demoed a Snapdragon-based, three-wheeled robot equipped with a smartphone camera and depth sensor in its dragon-shaped face, as well as 22 force feedback actuators guiding it to pick up objects and deposit them in bins. After receiving instructions wirelessly from a tablet, the little dragon bot was able to carry out its tasks autonomously.
The company also made availableprinting specs and source code for a much smaller robot called the Qualcomm Micro Rover, pictured at right. It's a small, 3D-printable tread crawler with camera-enabled "vision," powered and guided via simple servo instructions by a smartphone it wears on its back.
Pretty cool, huh? So are Qualcomm's plans for wearables, and specifically for enhanced eyewear.
The company's Vuforia mobile vision platform has been used for a number of augmented reality-type applications, including Lego's new Fusion line of toy sets, which combine play with physical bricks and an AR experience accessed via a tablet. Now Qualcomm is making a Vuforia SDK for Digital Eyewear available to its developers, with the idea that legitimate AR overlays on physical reality will be developed for smart glasses.
The first Qualcomm partners developing devices with the Vuforia SDK for Digital Eyewear include Samsung for its Gear VR headset, Epson for its Moverio BT-200, and ODG for its R-7, a newly announced stereoscopic see-through display system powered by a Snapdragon 805 processor.
"The promise of digital eyewear is to create a heads-up display for our daily lives. While the realization of this promise remains in the future, Vuforia is taking a big step in the right direction by enabling a first generation of applications for consumer and enterprise use," said Jay Wright, vice president of product management for Qualcomm Connected Experiences.
"Developers will now have the tools required to build experiences that will drive the adoption of the digital eyewear category. We look forward to seeing what developers make possible."
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