Qualcomm Up's Its Virtual Reality Game a bit

The chipmaker is advancing its chips to enhance the Virtual Reality experience for the customers

2015 was not that bad of a year for the smartphone industry as some might suggest otherwise. It should be mentioned that even though the previous year was not as bad as expected; the growth is likely to come across pressure in the future. Gartner, an IT research firm suggests that after skyrocketing years of growth in the smartphone industry, the industry will grow by only 2.6% in sales during the current year while the consumers spending in the specific category will be of 1.2%.

However, the worst is for the mobile chip maker Qualcomm Inc. as the forecast suggests that its mobile phone sales are forecasted to be flattened. Furthermore, Apple, Inc. one of the chipmaker’s biggest customers witnessed a decline in its sales and a drop in its quarterly revenue for the first time in the last 13 years. The company has been downgraded by analysts due to the financial earnings of the first quarter of the current fiscal year and the guidance for the upcoming quarter.

Having said that, the Virtual Reality technology has been sparking up; every technology companies wants to develop a VR headset for its customers. The Oculus Rift Virtual Reality headset is a much anticipated product that is scheduled to start shipping on March 28. While HTC’s Vive device will start it’s shipping a week later. However, like any other technology, customers will take time to get on board with it and get used to the idea of this technology. But it does seem like customers are anxiously waiting to get their hands on the VR headset.

How does Qualcomm fit into this? Well, the chipmaker has decided to unleash the potential of its Snapdragon 820 processor as it wants to ensure that it gets its fair share of the VR market pie. It has made its VR-ready chip to the developers with the help of the SDK – software development kit that it recently launched for IOS so that developers can start working on applications for the VR headsets. The Snapdragon downsizes some of the downsides of the VR experience which includes latency while making the experience more enjoyable as it enhances the VR world.

The biggest issue that the users have come across up till now is that of latency or buffering; some of the users who tested the device for the first time also got nauseous because of that but with the help of Qualcomm’s SD kit, developers are able to reduce latency by at least 50%.

VR has become a huge opportunity for the chip manufacturing company since the mobile market is ready to hit a saturating point the world of virtual reality is going to be the saving grace for the company. In addition to that, its rival Intel is also working on alternatives so that its reliance on the slow PC market lessens. However, its rival is working on chips to run of cloud based data centers, wearables and Internet of Things. It’s working on a few things unlike Qualcomm. But intel also realizes what Qualcomm says, that the VR world is a much appealing world for the customers and is the future.