Qualcomm Snapdragon 3100 may support eye tracking, could potentially be used in Google Glass successor

Many would agree that the smartwatch market has been floundering as of late. Some feel this is due to Qualcomm taking so long to put out an updated SoC. It was a little over two years ago when the company initially announced the Snapdragon 2100 chipset, and while it did wonders for the battery life of wearables, it still seems like the market has yet to mature. With the recent announcement of the Snapdragon 3100 SoC, a lot of us have been focused on smartwatches but it could usher in the next generation of AR wearables like Google Glass.

The Snapdragon 3100 from Qualcomm is poised to make a big impact in the smartwatch space. It was just rumored that Google will be releasing three different Wear OS devices later this year and all of them will be sporting this new chipset. This chip is going to be ideal for all wearable devices (and possibly some IoT products as well) as it will be using the ARM Cortex-A7 architecture and Adreno 304 GPU to keep things going. However, we have learned that the main benefit of this SoC is a power management integrated circuit that’s being called “Blackghost.”

The idea here is that “Blackghost” can run constantly while also being separated from the main processor. This will allow wearable products to still be able to listen for voice commands and still be light on battery usage. Even though most people are focused on the Snapdragon 3100 being used in smartwatches, a profile on Qualcomm’s job portal says the Snapdragon Wear 3100 platform is also said to be the foundation for new “Augmented Reality Glasses.” So we can see that they are wanting this chip to be used in multiple wearable devices and it will be perfect for something like a Google Glass-like product since the team has developed a powerful eye-tracking system with it.

The Snapdragon 3100 is said to be able to monitor the position of the pupil and cornea reflections with a camera capable of 120 frames per second without being too harsh on battery life. In fact, this task is said to only use 36 MIPS (million instructions per second) of computing power. We hope this new chip from Qualcomm will bring forth a resurgence in Android wearables.

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Source: WinFuture

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