{"id":980,"date":"2019-12-12T22:53:06","date_gmt":"2019-12-12T22:53:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/2019\/12\/12\/hands-on-with-qualcomms-xr2-its-like-wearing-glasses-for-the-first-time-news-opinion\/"},"modified":"2019-12-12T22:53:06","modified_gmt":"2019-12-12T22:53:06","slug":"hands-on-with-qualcomms-xr2-its-like-wearing-glasses-for-the-first-time-news-opinion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/2019\/12\/12\/hands-on-with-qualcomms-xr2-its-like-wearing-glasses-for-the-first-time-news-opinion\/","title":{"rendered":"Hands On With Qualcomm&#8217;s XR2: It&#8217;s Like Wearing Glasses for the First Time | News &#038; Opinion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> [ad_1]<br \/>\n<br \/><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/assets.pcmag.com\/media\/images\/678711-hands-on-with-qualcomm-s-xr2.jpg?thumb=y&amp;width=1280&amp;height=720\" \/><\/p>\n<div id=\"\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><span>HAWAII<span>\u2014<\/span>Do you need glasses? Not AR or VR glasses<span>\u2014<\/span>we&#8217;ll get there<span>\u2014<\/span>but the usual prescription kind, the ones that make your wobbly, fuzzy vision sharp. Putting Qualcomm&#8217;s XR2 VR system on, when you&#8217;ve previously tried the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/review\/367983\/oculus-quest\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Oculus Quest<\/a> or phone-based <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/article\/342537\/the-best-virtual-reality-vr-headsets\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">virtual reality<\/a>, feels like wearing glasses for the first time: Everything&#8217;s finally sharp.<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><span>I tried the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/news\/372381\/can-qualcomms-xr2-platform-make-ar-glasses-finally-happen\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">XR2<\/a> with Spatial, a company that does virtual reality conferencing and collaboration. So far, that&#8217;s the most exciting use I&#8217;ve seen for VR. Running Spatial puts you in a virtual world with avatars of the people you&#8217;re working with, where you can create and manage virtual objects and talk about them. For instance, if you&#8217;re planning a store display, you can build it, walk around it, and alter it with your coworkers.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"1290\" height=\"726\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/6YeSnExbLgc?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><span>Spatial runs on a bunch of platforms. On Oculus Quest there&#8217;s a wobbly indistinctness to a lot of text in the virtual world. It&#8217;s fine for chatting with people, but when you get to whiteboarding, well, you need glasses. Microsoft&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/news\/366791\/hands-on-with-hololens-2-its-an-ar-game-changer\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">HoloLens 2<\/a> is super sharp, but with a limited field of vision that means you might miss someone waving at you from the corner of your eye.<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><span>The XR2 solves all that. The virtual world is crystal clear, with small text readable and objects realistically sharp, thanks to the XR2&#8217;s 3K-per-eye display resolution. As a mixed AR\/VR system, you get a full field of view.<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><span>The prototype I used doesn&#8217;t have all of the XR2&#8217;s promised features. It&#8217;s hot and heavy, like most standalone VR headsets. It doesn&#8217;t have the pass-through video that would let a full-view VR headset act like an AR one. It also doesn&#8217;t have the seven cameras that would let the system do accurate hand and mouth tracking. The latter could fix one of Spatial&#8217;s spookier flaws, which is that the avatar&#8217;s faces don&#8217;t move in sync with what they&#8217;re saying. With the HoloLens, you can grab virtual objects and move them around just using your hands; once the XR2&#8217;s additional cameras come into play, you should be able to do that with XR2-based systems as well.<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><span>I&#8217;ve never been a big fan of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/feature\/362099\/the-best-vr-games-for-2019\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">VR gaming<\/a> or 360-degree video viewing; they both feel gimmicky, and like they&#8217;ve been tried and failed. But VR collaboration really offers something tactile and useful, whether it&#8217;s for purely business reasons or in a more social context. Spatial&#8217;s app (along with what Niantic plans with augmented reality Pokemon Go and <em>Harry Potter<\/em> titles) could be killer.<\/span><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><span>There&#8217;s a lot of potential here and a lot of distance to go before it&#8217;s realized. The XR2 chipset runs smooth, sharp virtual experiences without having to lean on a PC for rendering. Now we need to see it get into an actual retail headset that can deliver on its promise.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe width=\"300\" height=\"150\" style=\"width: 100%; height: 100%;\" src=\"https:\/\/mashable.com\/videos\/blueprint:jznR4ZDjox\/embed\/?player=pcmag&amp;autoplay=false&amp;mute=true\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>[ad_2]<br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/news\/372412\/hands-on-with-qualcomms-xr2-its-like-wearing-glasses-for\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[ad_1] HAWAII\u2014Do you need glasses? Not AR or VR glasses\u2014we&#8217;ll get there\u2014but the usual prescription kind, the ones that make your wobbly, fuzzy vision sharp. Putting Qualcomm&#8217;s XR2 VR system on, when you&#8217;ve previously tried the Oculus Quest or phone-based virtual reality, feels like wearing glasses for the first time: Everything&#8217;s finally sharp. I tried [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":981,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[168],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-xr"],"blocksy_meta":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/e928cfdc7rs.exactdn.com\/info\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2019\/12\/Hands-On-With-Qualcomms-XR2-Its-Like-Wearing-Glasses-for-scaled.jpg?strip=all","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2TFCd-fO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}