Qualcomm’s Snapdragon AR1+ Gen 1 is a new chipset for high-end smart glasses.
The base Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 is used in the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, launched in late 2023.
Qualcomm, says the new higher-end AR1+ Gen 1 is 26% smaller, enabling slimmer glasses arms, and uses 7% less power to enable longer battery life.
AR1+ Gen 1 also has an improved ISP, for higher quality image and video capture, and its NPU can run small language models on-device.
At Augmented World Expo 2025 today, while announcing AR1+ Gen 1, Qualcomm demonstrated prototype glasses with the chip running Meta’s Llama-3.2-1B fully on-device.
At 1 billion parameters, Llama-3.2-1B is a much smaller model than the large language models (LLMs) you may have used in ChatGPT, Gemini, or Meta AI, so won’t produce the same quality responses. But the advantage of running on-device is that it doesn’t require an internet connection or external device to function.
As with the base AR1, the new chip supports outputting imagery to heads-up displays (HUDs), both monocular and binocular.
AR1+ Gen 1 joins Qualcomm’s wide range of chipsets for VR, MR, AR, and smart glasses, slotting above AR1 Gen 1 but below the AR2 Gen 1. Its XR2 Gen 2 chipset powers Quest 3, Quest 3S, and Pico 4 Ultra, and the XR2+ Gen 2 is set to power Samsung’s Android XR headset as well as Sony’s enterprise headset.
Qualcomm didn’t announce any specific companies that will use AR1+ Gen 1, but The Verge, The Information, The Financial Times, and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman have all previously reported that Meta intends to release high-end smart glasses with a small monocular HUD in late 2025, codenamed Hypernova, so it’s possible it will be the first device to use the chip.
David Heaney
