Qualcomm CEO Teases New Smart Glasses Developed By Google and Samsung

Qualcomm has been making headlines this week with its new Snapdragon X Plus chip for Copilot+ PCs and reports about the company being interested in purchasing parts of Intel’s PC business. In an interview with CNBC yesterday, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon also said that the company was actively working on mixed reality smart glasses with Samsung and Google.

You may remember that last year, Samsung announced during its Galaxy Unpacked event in February that it had teamed up with Qualcomm on Google to work on “extended reality” products. If there have been no updates on this work since then, Apple has now entered the mixed-reality market with its Vision Pro headset, while Meta has reportedly canceled a premium mixed-reality headset designed to compete with the Vision Pro.

Meta, however, may have created a more mainstream product with its second-generation Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which probably benefit from the association with a luxury brand with iconic designs. If the partnership between Qualcomm, Google, and Samsung may not have the same brand power, Qualcomm’s CEO suggested that the new smart glasses the three companies are working on will offer a distinctive experience.

“It’s going to be a new product, it’s going to be new experiences,” Amon said about the new product. “But 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,” Amon continued.

Even though the new smart glasses will require a connection with a phone, the Qualcomm CEO added that “AI is going to run on the device. It’s going to run on the cloud. 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.”

The exec didn’t say when we could expect these new smart glasses to come to market. However, Anon seems confident that smart glasses may be the best type of hardware to make mixed reality technology become truly mainstream. “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,” Amon said.