Qualcomm’s latest chip hints that more powerful smart glasses could be on the way

The Snapdragon Reality Elite will first arrive in Xreal’s Project Aura Android XR glasses this fall.

The Snapdragon Reality Elite will first arrive in Xreal’s Project Aura Android XR glasses this fall.

Smart glasses are still a nascent category, but chipmaker Qualcomm is hard at work upgrading the silicon to power the next wave of XR devices: the Snapdragon Reality Elite.

Although Qualcomm is announcing the chip today at Augmented World Expo, we’ve technically already gotten a hands-on with a device powered by the new chip at last month’s Google I/O: the forthcoming Aura glasses for Android XR. At the time, Xreal and Google were coy about the processor upgrades to the long-awaited spectacles. Turns out, it was the Reality Elite.

Spec-wise, the new chip focuses on across-the-board performance upgrades. The GPU gets a 60 percent bump, the CPU gets a 30 percent increase, and the NPU gets “up to 160 percent higher performance.” It supports 4.4K resolution at 90 frames per second per eye and less latency. Battery life has also been improved by up to 20 percent, and Qualcomm was able to improve cooling as well by boosting power efficiency. Supposedly, while handling heavy workloads, the Reality Elite will remain up to 12 degrees Celsius cooler than Qualcomm’s last-gen XR chips.

In other words, this chip ought to support better visuals for immersive XR experiences, more power to handle larger LLMs for AI features, and lighter, longer-lasting glasses. You know, all the technical problems currently plaguing the smart glasses space.

This — plus the Snapdragon Wear Elite chip that Qualcomm introduced back at Mobile World Congress in February — offers a few important clues about what we’re likely to see from wearable devices this fall and in 2027. (After all, as a components maker, Qualcomm is creating chips to meet the specific demands of partners like Meta and Google.) Both the Wear Elite and Reality Elite can be used to power smart glasses. The former is likely to be found in audio-only glasses, while the latter will likely be used for power-hungry display glasses with AI-centric features. Either way, the fact that Qualcomm boosted AI performance across both chips indicates gadget makers are gung-ho on stuffing more AI into glasses, smartwatches, fitness trackers, pins, and pendants. The battery and cooling improvements are also a tacit acknowledgement that many smart glasses with displays currently struggle with the tradeoffs between bulky or unwieldy designs and all-day battery life. The risk of overheating has also been a major problem for smart glasses makers when it comes to offering more advanced features. (Because no one wants a pair of glasses to burn their faces.) Provided the Snapdragon Reality Elite’s upgrades can deliver genuine improvements in this area, it might not be too long before we start seeing some more impressive AI wearables hit the market.

• Victoria Song