The AR Show: Brian Vogelsang (Qualcomm) on Drawing on Lessons of the Past to Build Today’s Headworn AR Ecosystem | Otter.ai

The AR Show: Brian Vogelsang (Qualcomm) on Drawing on Lessons of the Past to Build Today’s Headworn AR Ecosystem

Jason McDowall1h

Jason McDowall

00:03

Welcome to the AR show where I dive deep into augmented reality with a focus on the technology, the use cases and the people behind them. I'm your host Jason McDowall. Today's conversation is with Brian Vogelsang. Brian is the Senior Director of Product at Qualcomm focused on Snapdragon Spaces, an XR developer platform for headworn augmented reality. This AR development kit is built on open standards and meant to complement the efforts by Niantic's Lightship, and others. Brian started his career as the CTO and co founder of a very early Internet Service Provider startup. He then joined Qualcomm in the mid 1990s. Back when it was still a young company. There he focused initially on IT infrastructure and security before shifting his focus to the very early days of mobile app development within Qualcomm. For the last four years, Brian has been working with Hugo Swart and other members of the Qualcomm team and developing Qualcomm strategy, products and ecosystem around augmented and virtual reality. In this conversation, Brian shares how his long history of Qualcomm gave him a front row seat to the development of the mobile app ecosystem in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as well as the smartphone ecosystem. A decade later, he pulled some lessons forward to the AR ecosystem that Qualcomm is helping to build today. And he looks ahead to 2022.

Brian Vogelsang

01:17

I think that 2022 is about building the ecosystem and building momentum. I think we'll see adoption, certainly of devices like these air viewers that we spent a little bit of time talking about, you know, we saw these viewers introduced in 2018, with glasses like the unreal light, and more recently Lenovo with a three. So glasses tethered to smartphones, and powered by a platform like Snapdragon spaces, we'll see more products coming to market using this architecture. And then also VR devices that have video see through experiences. So you're doing augmented reality on a virtual reality device. I think that's another trend that we see accelerating in 2022.

Jason McDowall

01:59

We go on to discuss the differences in standalone versus companion devices or viewers, as Qualcomm calls them. And of course, we talk about the recently announced Snapdragon spaces, which is built on the open XR standards, and incorporates innovation around user and environmental understanding. As a reminder, you can find the show notes for this and other episodes at our website var show.com. Let's dive in.

Jason McDowall

02:23

Brian, we were both at AWS last week, which for me, it was the first in person conference I've been to since the beginning of the pandemic, I think the previous one was photonics West, just prior to COVID. But from going to AWS, it felt a lot like a family reunion, like a family reunion, which you're really excited to see all the rest of the family haven't seen them in a long time. And in for me, it was just one fantastic conversation after another. And the struggle that I had was there just wasn't enough time to go and to have all those conversations that I wanted to have and also see all the amazing technology that was being demonstrated that I wanted to see. But for you, what was the experience like for you?

Brian Vogelsang

02:57

Yeah, I mean, I have to say that the the highlight was really just seeing people and reconnecting, catching up in person. Just so many, so many fist bumps, it was really just great to be back with a community and obviously saw a bunch of really interesting technology as well. So it was fantastic. Any favorites on the technology side that

Jason McDowall

03:15

stood out for you?

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