Qualcomm sees 5G, AI-enabled smart glasses segment growing in India: Savi Soin
Qualcomm
termed
smart glasses
as the next computing platform of the future, and said that it is bullish about its growth potential in digitally savvy India, combined with telecom carriers' fifth-generation (
5G
) networks and
artificial intelligence
(AI).
'I think it will be amazing to see what smart glass can do for all of us. I feel it is the next computing platform of the future. We are very excited about it, and India, specifically, has very tech-savvy people. There are more than 300 million Gen Z citizens looking for different use cases, and 5G is just about everywhere,'
Savi Soin
, senior vice president, Qualcomm & president, Qualcomm India, said on Monday.
'So India is about to explode in terms of what
spatial computing
can do,' he said at the company's 'Snapdragon for India – XR Day'.
He added that AI-enabled smart glasses are going to 'revolutionise everything we do'.
Smart glasses, according to the San Diego-headquartered chip vendor, have applications in nearly all industry verticals, from education and healthcare to automobile and entertainment and productivity.
Qualcomm offers the end-to-end stack for smart glasses, including chipsets and platforms, as well as, hardware and software development kits, enabling its original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and developer partners to build innovative use cases.
More than 100 mixed reality (MR), virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) devices globally, including Meta Quest 2 and 3, Lenovo ThinkReality A3, Ray-Ban Meta collection, and others, use Snapdragon solutions.
It has partnered with India's Lenskart to equip the latter's upcoming smart glasses. Lenskart earlier this year launched the 'Phonic' smart glasses with audio-enabled technology, priced at ₹4,000.
'Qualcomm has invested in CPU, GPU, NPU (neural processing unit), DSP (digital signal processor), camera, video, audio, low power, displays, etc., into growing our mobile business. And now deriving from the mobile business, we are expanding into the XR business, wearable business, PC business, automotive business, and the IoT businesses,' said Alex Katouzian, group general manager (mobile, compute, & XR), Qualcomm Technologies Inc.
The combination of Qualcomm's Spaces platform with open-source codes, middleware and hardware-development platforms and interfaces has allowed more than '1000s of developers' to provide feedback to Qualcomm about its algorithms and hardware performance in spatial computing, he said.
'So we built a virtual cycle of feedback and improved our solutions over the years, and then, with our partners, Meta and Google Android XR, that platform opens up to all developers. And so our partnerships with these big platform providers allow us to access the development community. Combining all of these things, we have become the de facto platform of choice across all of the
XR applications
,' Katouzian added.
According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), the global AR/VR headset market posted a strong rebound in Q1 2025, growing 18.1% year-over-year. The resurgence was led by Meta, which captured 50.8% of the market, followed by XREAL (12.1%), and ByteDance (9.4%).
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