Snapdragon Spaces Blog

China XR Innovation Challenge 2023: Pushing the Boundaries of XR Development

The China XR Innovation Challenge has become a highly anticipated event in the XR community, showcasing the talent and innovation of developers and OEM partners. The 2023 edition of the contest brought together a record-breaking number of participants, highlighting the rapid growth and advancement of XR technology in China. In this blog post, we recap the highlights of the event and celebrate the winning teams that pushed the boundaries of XR development.

November 27, 2023

Spanning several months (from April to September 2023), the China XR Innovation Challenge 2023 attracted a staggering number of 505 registration. This marked a significant increase compared to previous years, solidifying the contest’s position as the largest XR developer event in China. The event brought together developers, OEM partners, and XR enthusiasts, fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing among industry leaders. The event showcased the latest advancements in XR technology and featured a diverse range of contest tracks. Read on to learn about the key highlights of the event.

Contest Tracks:

Event organizers offered nine designated tracks, catering to various aspects of XR development. These tracks included XR Consumer, XR Enterprise, PICO MR Innovation, PICO Game, YVR Innovation, QIYU MR Innovation, Skyworth XR Innovation, and Snapdragon Spaces Tracks. A diverse range of tracks allowed participants to explore different areas of XR development and showcase their creativity and skills.

New for this year was a dedicated Snapdragon Spaces track that saw more than 40 entries. Selected developers were given development kits to work with which resulted in 18 Spaces apps submitted for consideration by judges.
Contestants created their apps on a variety of development kits powered by Qualcomm XR processors:

PICO 4, PICO 4 Pro

YVR 2

Skyworth PANCAKE 1C

Lenovo ThinkReality A3

QIYU X

Technical Webinars:

To support the contestants and provide valuable insights, the event organizers conducted a series of eight technical webinars. These webinars covered topics such as VR/AR registration, 3D engine utilization, VR game development, and VR sports fitness. The webinars attracted a significant number of attendees, totaling over 21.2K views, highlighting the thirst for knowledge and expertise in the XR community.

Awards Ceremony:

The contest culminated in a grand final awards ceremony held in Qingdao. The ceremony brought together 132 attendees, including contestants, judges, industry experts, and XR enthusiasts. Together, we celebrated the achievements of the participants and recognized the most impressive and inspiring projects in the XR field.

Winning Teams:

The contest team recognized 41 projects as the most impressive and inspiring in their respective tracks. These winning teams showcased their innovation, creativity, and technical expertise. Here are a few examples of the selected finalist projects:

Project 1: “Finger Saber” This project introduced a new gesture recognition experience in VR gaming, allowing players to control a lightsaber using hand gestures. The innovative control mechanism added a new level of immersion and interactivity to the gaming experience.
Project 2: “End of the Road” was a cross-platform multiplayer cooperative game set in a post-apocalyptic world. Players worked together as outlaws to destroy evil forces and protect valuable resources. The game showcased the power of collaboration and teamwork in an immersive XR environment.
Project 3: “EnterAR” was an AR tower defense shooting game that combined cartoon-style graphics with intuitive gameplay. Players defended a crystal from alien creatures using a bow and arrow, leveraging the power of AR technology to create an engaging and immersive experience.

Have a look at the video below for an overview of the winning projects:

It’s fair to conclude that China XR Innovation Challenge 2023 was a resounding success, showcasing the immense talent and innovation in the XR community. The event provided a platform for developers, OEM partners, and XR enthusiasts to come together, exchange ideas, and push the boundaries of XR development. The winning teams demonstrated the incredible potential of XR technology and its applications across various industries. As the XR landscape continues to evolve, events like this play a crucial role in driving innovation and shaping the future of XR in China.

Snapdragon branded products are products of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.

Expanding Snapdragon Spaces platform support to include MR and VR

SEPTEMBER 27, 2022

When we launched Snapdragon Spaces at AWE in June 2022, we set out to create a platform and ecosystem for headworn augmented reality that empowers developers to create immersive AR experiences built on open standards. Inspired by the excitement and innovation we’ve seen from you all building with Snapdragon Spaces worldwide, we are proud to be working with this innovative community shaping the future of the medium. While it’s still very early in the journey to a world where spatial computing is interwoven in our daily lives, the pace is accelerating each day, and Qualcomm is more committed than ever to making this our collective reality.

Snapdragon Spaces is evolving quickly, with 8 releases thus far in 2022 we are bringing new features every six weeks like Hand Tracking, persistent Local Anchors, and Hit Testing. We really value the feedback from the developer community, and want to hear your ideas – so please continue to share your thoughts and upvote features on the roadmap. We have also launched a Discord server for the community to connect and share. Feel free to stop by — we would love to learn more about you and your work in XR.

While we started our work with Snapdragon Spaces in augmented reality, our team knew that XR was evolving rapidly. And this means that virtual and augmented reality devices will begin to converge with the addition of video passthrough, or mixed reality (MR) features coming to VR headsets. Mixed reality enables experiences that blend augmented and virtual reality by adding stereo color cameras to a virtual reality headset and passing the video from those cameras through to the VR displays. This is a difficult problem to solve, and we have been working for multiple years optimizing camera and video image processing pipelines in Snapdragon-based XR Platforms to enable the highest quality and lowest latency mixed reality experiences.

For developers, mixed reality means that they will be able to create experiences on VR headsets that are much more like the AR experiences on optical see-through devices such as the Lenovo ThinkReality A3 AR glasses in the Snapdragon Spaces Dev Kit. In fact, we believe that developers should be able to have portability between the two. We are excited to share that Snapdragon Spaces will be adding support for mixed and virtual reality in early 2023. Our vision is to allow you as a developer to build mixed reality experiences on Snapdragon Spaces for VR/MR headsets and bring the same application to AR glasses or vice versa.

This will enable developers building Snapdragon Spaces experiences on augmented reality glasses to expand the number of devices they can reach with their app to include VR headsets with mixed reality. It will also allow VR developers who start experimenting with mixed reality to run the same application on augmented reality glasses. We believe this is an industry first and we are excited to be enabling this capability for Snapdragon Spaces developers soon.

Look out for more details about the VR/MR headsets we will be supporting with Snapdragon Spaces in the coming months, as well as information about how and when you can get started. To stay informed (if you are not already subscribed), please join our mailing list and Discord server. Thank you for your enthusiasm for XR, support for Snapdragon Spaces, and commitment to supporting open platforms and ecosystems in spatial computing.

Cheers,
Brian Vogelsang
Sr. Director, XR Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.