qualcomm-vrdk-845 — Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 VRDK, Image courtesy Qualcomm

Companies Can Soon Make Vive Wave Headsets Based on Qualcomm’s New VR Reference Design

Mar 21, 2018

Qualcomm today announced their Snapdragon 845 Virtual Reality Development Kit (VRDK) reference headset will have support for Vive Wave, HTC’s open API which allows a large range of third-party headsets and peripherals access to a common platform. The move to integrate Vive Wave into Qualcomm’s latest VRDK will essentially give prospective manufactures turn-key access to HTC’s mobile version of its Viveport app store.

Just like the company’s previous 835 VRDK, which was used as the foundation for the creation of several standalone headsets including Vive Focus and Pico Neo, the new 845 VRDK will soon make its way to headset manufacturers looking to integrate the processor along with its new capabilities into their own future VR headsets. This time though, companies won’t have to add support for Vive Wave themselves, as it comes part and parcel in 845.

Qualcomm’s 845 VRDK and its companion SDK, which includes support for 6 degrees of freedom (6DoF) positional tracking, eye tracking, foveated rendering and a room-scale boundary system, are expected to ship to OEMs in Q2 2018.

The 845 VRDK, which was first unveiled at MWC 2018, is said to offer a 30% increase in graphics performance and power efficiency, and twice as much display throughput compared to its 835 predecessor. Eye tracking hardware and algorithms developed by Sweden-based firm Tobii and Qualcomm’s own ‘Adreno Foveation’ foveated rendering solution are also a part of the 845 headset reference design, which is said to allow applications to render more demanding applications while reducing GPU load. Tobii’s eye tracking can also be used to make social VR more immersive by translating eye movement to avatars, enabling gaze-based UI input, and letting developers use the data for analytics purposes.