Snapdragon Spaces at MIT Reality Hack

Joining the world’s biggest XR hackathon as one of the key sponsors is a big endeavour that comes with a big responsibility. The team brought a dedicated Snapdragon Spaces™ hack track, two hosted workshops and networking events, showcased demos – to help hackathon participants stretch the limits of their imagination.

FEBRUARY 27, 2023

With five days full of tech workshops, talks, discussions and collaborations, the MIT hackathon brought together thought leaders, brand mentors, students, XR creators and technology lovers who flew from all over the world to participate. The overall event had 450 attendees. There were 350+ hackers from 26 countries placed into 70+ teams; and the Snapdragon Spaces track had 10 teams. All skill levels were represented, and participants had the opportunity to explore the latest technology from Qualcomm Technologies and Snapdragon Spaces.

The Snapdragon Spaces team joined other event key sponsors at the opening day Inspiration Expo. Using the opportunity to connect with participants, we answered questions about the XR developer platform, encouraged hackers to join the hack, and showcased our “AR Expo” demo. The demo uses Snapdragon Spaces SDK features, letting hackers experience a variety of AR use cases – from gaming to media streaming and kitchen assistance apps. Later on, hackers had the opportunity to join Steve Lukas, Director of XR Product Management at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., and Rogue Fong, Senior Engineer at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., at the workshop dedicated to developing lightweight AR glasses experiences. This augmented reality-focused session educated participants on the features and capabilities of the Snapdragon Spaces XR Developer Platform.

Closer collaboration with hackers followed at the Snapdragon Spaces hack track, where the team hosted 50 participants in 10 teams in a dedicated area for hacking. The range of project ideas was truly impressive, spanning games, social good projects, and education. While some projects leaned into the functionality of Lenovo ThinkReality A3 and Motorola edge+ phone HW devkit , others integrated additional hardware, such as 3D displays and neurofeedback devices.

Our track rewarded the most innovative, compelling and impactful experience using Snapdragon Spaces, with Stone Soup team taking the first prize for using AR technology to help the unhoused conceptualize, customize and co-create their dream homes. The winning project executed their idea with a high level of polish, utilizing Snapdragon Spaces’ Plane Detection and Hit Detection perception technology, and integrated ESRI maps data into their project.

The runner-up, Skully resented a multipurpose education technology solution that brought up learning modules and 3D models when target images are located. The solution offers students a hands-on approach to learning and allows using Hand Tracking and Gaze Tracking to interact with lesson material. Skully is highly inclusive and offers those unfamiliar with interacting with AR learning modules in the form of more traditional learning formats (such as video).

Worthy of honorable mention is Benvision – the winner of “Working together for inclusion and equality” for enabling the visually impaired to experience the world through a combination of the Snapdragon Spaces 6DoF headset plus a bespoke real-time machine learning algorithm which turns landscapes into soundscapes. Also, Up in the Air team, who won in “Spatial Audio” category, introduced the app that turns a daily working space into a pleasing fantasy-style environment, using Hand Tracking for navigation and Spatial Anchors to anchor a workspace in user’s environment.

MIT Reality Hack 2023 left a long-lasting impression on all the participants. The opportunity to engage with key partners, industry leaders, and a broad XR developer community brought a new perspective into the use and future development of spatial computing. Our team left inspired by unforgettable collaboration, ideation and creativity of the hackers and will be working on incorporating their valuable product feedback in the next SDK releases.

Snapdragon Spaces Developer team in collaboration with Qualcomm Developer Network

Snapdragon Spaces is a product of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.

Showcasing XR enterprise solutions at AES

Bringing together the most prominent players in the enterprise space, AES (Augmented Enterprise Summit) took place in October in San Diego. Snapdragon Spaces team used the opportunity to connect with the audience and show advancements of our ecosystem developers.

November, 11, 2022

The event’s theme this year highlighted how selected enterprise players use immersive technologies to enable remote operations, improve training, increase safety, reduce costs, and enhance the customer experience. To kick off the first day of the event, Brian Vogelsang (Sr. Director, XR Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.) gave a keynote presentation where he explained how Snapdragon technology brings the best-in-class connectivity across industries, enabling enterprise solutions through a decade long innovation in XR.
“Enterprise AR is starting to accelerate from the innovations that we are helping to build to create lightweight and lower power smart glasses and better form factor. We are seeing enterprise VR also starting to take off and are really excited about the possibilities and use cases” – highlighted Vogelsang.

“With Snapdragon Spaces, we are allowing developers to take the applications developed in VR or MR and bring them over to optical see-through glasses. If you are an ISV or IT company investing in augmented reality experiences, you can start working on AR and bring it to VR device and vice versa. This is a unique thing that has not been done in the industry and we are excited to enable it”.

Proving those points, the Snapdragon Spaces booth showcased four demos of our partners that represented the entire spectrum of XR enterprise solutions – from remote rendering to AR instruction, learning & development, digital collaboration, workflow guidance and remote assistance. Each company has been successfully using Snapdragon Spaces to streamline the development of their applications and bring value to the users.

Here’s how our partners make it easier to create enterprise solutions that meet business needs:

• holo|one presented Sphere, a mixed reality collaboration and productivity platform for enterprises that takes away the need for expensive customization. Instead, the platform offers seamless integration of turnkey AR into business processes.

• Holo-Light is on a mission to build a powerful streaming platform for enterprises to leverage immersive experiences, 3D content and scale AR/VR use cases – all while using Lenovo ThinkReality A3 smart glasses.

• Arvizio featured their AR Instructor – a no-code remote assistance solution that uses the “see-what-I-see” principle to overlay visual instructions directly into the worker’s field of view. The platform allows displaying various forms of content – from video clips to images, 3D models, and even real-time 3D annotations.

• VictoryXR presented their solution for immersive education and training, equipping users with an X-ray-like vision to study human anatomy in a virtual environment.

The Augmented Enterprise Summit provided a unique opportunity for developers, leaders and innovators across the verticals to discuss the latest trends and developments in the field of extended reality. We are looking forward to integrating the insights gained into the next iterations of Snapdragon Spaces.

Snapdragon Spaces Developer Team

Snapdragon and Snapdragon Spaces is a product of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.

XR and 5G mmWave hackathon challenge in Tampere, Finland

For three days, the Finnish city of Tampere became the hub of the university and start-up developers, who took part in the first-ever Snapdragon Spaces hackathon. Participants had the chance to use state-of-art smart glasses powered by Snapdragon to design new use cases and leverage 5G mmWave connectivity and extended reality (XR).

OCTOBER, 24, 2022

Organized by Qualcomm Europe, the City of Tampere, Elisa Networks, Nokia, CGI, and Ultrahack, the hackathon presented a unique opportunity for local developers to compete and make the best out of the future “Europe’s fastest city” 5G mmW rich data infrastructure, including the iconic Nokia arena. Completed with ten independent teams of developers with various profiles, the event set out multiple goals. First, to enable developers to unlock capacities of fast mmW network. Secondly, to let participants apply XR as a new UI medium and use open data sets the city of Tampere has provided — all while using Snapdragon Spaces™ SDK and DevKit consisting of Lenovo ThinkReality A3 smart glasses and Motorola edge+ smartphone. With just two days and no prior experience working with Snapdragon Spaces SDK, all the teams could develop and demonstrate the potential of XR and 5G mmWave capabilities through innovative project ideas.

The hackathon started on Friday with onboarding, an opening session, and focused mentoring. Participants were briefed on the pitch and expected deliverables on the second day. Afterward, sessions interchanged with mentoring, checkpoints, and visiting the Nokia area for the 5G area for mmWave testing. Sunday, the event’s final day, was spent at the arena, where participants had a chance to do the final testing, get the mentor’s input and prepare for the pitch and presentation round. The jury consisted of Steve Lukas, Director of Product Management for Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., Pekka Sundstorm, Nokia Head of Strategy Execution Europe, Teppo Rantanen, Executive Director at the City of Tampere, and Taavi Mattila, Business Lead at Elisa.

To succeed at the final pitch and demo, participating teams were asked to present concepts that will use the Tampere city data set over fast connectivity including 5G mmW, integrate XR, stand out from already existing solutions and bring additional value to the target audience. The teams were also expected to think through the ease of deployment and utilize Snapdragon Spaces SDK and Hardware Developer Kit, apart from other criteria. Two out of three winning teams leveraged user-generated content in their use cases, while all of them utilized open datasets made available by the city of Tampere. Tampere’s 3D “twin-city” model was particularly popular. Teams thought through how they would utilize 5G mmW both for data retrieval and content upload of user-generated and other content at scale in a multi-user, city-wide deployment.

The concept of Tampere xRT revolved around city location-based art installation and platform. The team delivered an impressive combination of pitch, idea, and implementation. Whispers of Tampere presented the idea of sneaking audio snippets into the city park, allowing people to interact with the city and each other. Audio messages can be placed at any city location and then discovered and retrieved by others. The third winner, AR Digital Spaces presented an idea of dynamic AR showrooms with an immersive ad-based concept. The jury was impressed with an effective combination of various technologies in one app that promised to make ads more engaging and purposeful. Another two participating teams received honorary mentions: ARenify for their promise to transform sports experiences and Public Commuter for the concept aimed to make the city transport network more accessible and inclusive.

All the winning concepts involved integration with XR, cloud-hosted UGC, fast connectivity including 5G mmW for at-scale, city-wide use, as well as audio recording features on Android, Azure Kinect, and web-based portals for managing content. The first of the many Snapdragon Spaces hackathons to come, the event has provided an immense learning experience for all parties in co-designing for the upcoming Metaverse era. The City of Tampere is already exploring the possibility of leveraging some of the ideas and teams as part of many smart city activities. At the same time, the project participants plan to apply for European funding to help expand the 5G mmWave network outside the arena and explore bringing hackathon ideas to the citizens of Tampere.

Snapdragon Spaces Developer team in collaboration with Qualcomm Europe

Snapdragon Spaces is a product of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.

Kicking off the Snapdragon Spaces program with hubraum and T-Mobile US

Berlin was buzzing the last week of June. After weeks of pitching, careful consideration, and preparations, hubraum and the Snapdragon Spaces™ teams have gathered in the capital of Germany to meet selected developers and officially kick off our joint Snapdragon Spaces XR developer program.

JULY, 21, 2022

Out of 174 companies that initially applied, 11 companies were selected into the program and got a chance to meet their peers, future mentors, and sparring partners. Business and XR leaders that joined the event from Deutsche Telekom, Qualcomm Technologies, Lenovo and Volucap provided the audience with a deep dive into the capabilities of the Snapdragon Spaces platform and shared their vision of the future of the XR industry.

Developer teams in turn contributed by taking the stage one by one to present their ideas of the apps and experiences they plan to bring in headworn AR using Snapdragon Spaces platform capabilities. Each team also received a hardware dev kit, containing the Lenovo ThinkReality A3 smart glasses and Motorola edge+ smartphone so they could start bringing their AR ideas to life.

The afternoon was spent in breakout sessions where each startup had a chance to sit down with their mentors, connect on a personal level and discuss the next steps for successful collaboration.

The sheer variety of use cases, target audiences, and creative ideas to apply headworn augmented reality that participants offered was impressive. The start-ups’ geography spans from the USA to Spain to Trinidad & Tobago, and industries vary from music (PatchXR) to children’s mental health (Tiny Giant Heroes), science (3D for Science), and wellness. The program is on a good path for a Demo Day in October 2022.

Over the next few months, we will continue working closely with the program participants to provide them with mentorship and support to bring their daring AR ideas to life and create value for their audiences.

Snapdragon Spaces Developer Team

Snapdragon Spaces is a product of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.