How realistic is the light representation in the mobile games you develop? A big part of the user experience in all games is how well you approximate the real-world model of light, including reflections, refraction and shadows. War Thunder Mobile, the flagship MMO title from Gaijin Entertainment, has become the first major mobile game to take advantage of ray tracing on the Qualcomm Adreno GPU. Ray tracing is an advanced technique for closely approximating real-world lighting effects in a rendered environment. Because of its high computational cost, ray tracing has been limited to PC and conso ..read more

If you’re designing and developing for the Internet of Things, you live in a low-throughput, low-power world. Download the eBookYou’re on the lookout for wireless standards that will keep Things like parking meters, asset trackers and energy meters connected on a tight power budget. You also value global coverage, accuracy in positioning and a strong standards roadmap. We’ve studied the low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) standards for IoT, going back to LTE Cat 1 in 3GPP Release 8. We’ve found that LTE Cat 1bis holds the most promise and ticks the most important boxes for IoT developers, desi ..read more

“It’s a good model,” you say, thinking about the model you’ve trained in the cloud for your machine learning application. “I just wish we could fine-tune it on the user’s device.” Now you can do just that. We’ve published a toolkit for transfer learning in the Qualcomm Adreno OpenCL Machine Learning SDK v.3.0. Following the example in the SDK, you can take a pretrained MobileNet V1 model and retrain it after deployment to a mobile device. In this post, I’ll describe transfer learning and show you how to test a useful variation called fine-tuning. Transfer learning on mobile devices The last ti ..read more

Co-written by Sam Holmes Virtual reality (VR) devices utilize high resolutions and framerates to create a sense of presence and immersion. Creating immersive content at these high resolutions and framerates can be taxing on performance, memory, system and wireless bandwidth, and power. At Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. we’ve been exploring solutions to address these challenges, and super resolution techniques is one such technique which can be beneficial. Recently we worked with Guy Godin, creator of Virtual Desktop, to integrate Snapdragon Game Super Resolution boosting the quality of PCVR-to-HM ..read more

Advances in video conference technologies let users collaborate across geographies, time zones, and even pandemics. But great experiences happen when every attendee feels immersed in the meeting, and their voices are heard. Today’s average technology often lacks that immersive experience, and issues like disruptive background noise or limited camera views, can make video conferences feel disjointed and impersonal. In collaboration with Taiwan-based AmTRAN Technology Co, Qualcomm Technologies set out to change that by building a cutting-edge video collaboration reference design powered by the Q ..read more

What will it take for headphone audio to feel and sound like real-world audio? The engineers at IDUN audio in Denmark have an answer: dynamic spatial audio. They’ve implemented an interactive acoustics simulation in software running on the Qualcomm QCC5171 and Qualcomm QCC5141 chipsets, which manufacturers build into wireless headphones and earbuds. In this post, you’ll learn about the problems inherent to headphone audio, IDUN audio’s approach to addressing them and what it’s like to implement an audio algorithm. Making headphones feel like the real world Humans, like most animals, naturally ..read more

“One size fits all” sounds convenient, but it doesn’t always apply. It’s rarely true in clothing, and it’s not often true in audio, either. The engineers at Audiodo approach mobile audio with fresh eyes – and ears! They’ve created Audiodo Personal Sound, which tailors mobile audio to your unique hearing characteristics in headphones and hearables powered by the Qualcomm QCC5171 audio platform. It’s an example of improving user experience by locating the technology as close as possible to the user’s senses. Making mobile audio sound right for you Everybody hears things — music, voices, nature ..read more

Play Ball! Have you ever wondered what it would be like to visually experience what it’s like standing in the batter’s box at a Major League Baseball stadium? This is exactly what the team at Rock Paper Reality (RPR) had been thinking about. Inspired by this idea, their industry-leading augmented reality (AR) developers created an interactive game that would allow visitors at the San Diego Padres Hall of Fame to play a shooting-gallery style pitching match. The game, created in Unity, features a 1:1 model of Petco Park along with past and present Hall of Fame players as interactable targets in ..read more

We believe that lightweight headworn AR glasses are poised to become the next evolution of the smartphone. They offer even more immersive experiences than 2D screens and will transition users from looking down at their phones, back to looking around at their surroundings, while retaining that digital view. In The Architecture of Snapdragon Spaces, we covered how our Snapdragon Spaces XR Developer Platform was designed to facilitate the development of these headworn AR experiences. But it’s not until you get into the small details that you realize why Snapdragon Spaces is a BIG deal for develop ..read more

Today, edge devices are everywhere, with tens of billions more expected to be deployed in the coming years. They are used for everything from measuring temperatures and tracking assets to controlling production processes across many verticals including IoT, robotics, automotive, and healthcare. Data, the by-product, is becoming increasingly important to organizations as these IoT devices acquire more of it. However, the exponential growth of devices and the data produced, brings new challenges around deployment, management, and security of the assets. The name of the game in today’s device dep ..read more