Connected in 3D, Realtime Solutions and Digital Twins podcast with your host Ashley Crowder. Hi, welcome to Connected in 3D, Realtime Solutions and Digital Twins. I'm your host Ashley Crowder, co-founder of Ventana, and I'm here today with Ziad Asghar. He is the SVP and General Manager of XR Spatial Computing at Qualcomm. With over 25 years in the wireless semiconductor industry, Ziad previously led chip roadmap planning across Qualcomm's mobile, automotive, XR, and IoT divisions. Prior to that, he contributed to the design of the first UMTS chipset at Texas Instruments. He is a wealth of knowledge and leading the global XR business and unit across product strategy, P&L, ecosystem development, and partnerships in virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. So I'm so happy to have you on. Thanks so much for joining.
So let's dive in. You've had a long career in technology innovation. What got you interested in XR and spatial computing? What led you to leading this division at Qualcomm?
Yeah, I mean just think about it. We've transitioned. We used to have personal computing PCs and laptops, and then smartphones came along and we started to do more of our tasks on smartphones. It's really an integral part of our life. We didn't stop using the PCs; we used them for certain tasks, but now we moved on to using the mobile phones. I think that there is a similar huge interrupt that's going to be coming where we are moving towards spatial computing devices such as smart glasses or immersive AR devices or even MR devices, getting us to this next world where you basically can merge the virtual and the real worlds in a real amazing fashion that adds to the experience in a very impressive way. And I think that's why people will start to use these devices more, and in a way, some of those use cases that we may have on the mobile start to now move to these devices. We still hold dear to all the other devices that we have. So as I've thought about it, I've said, hey, what are the key technologies, what are the key experiences that we want? One thing that comes across is, I always call it internally, it's a very Qualcomm problem, right? Because you got to get to a point where you can do all this processing but at the lowest power possible. And this is really our pedigree. We've been doing this for the longest time. We don't come from devices that are plugged in; we come from devices that have tiny batteries. And those learnings set us up extremely well. And then some of the changes and really the acquisitions and the implementation and the R&D that we have done over more than a decade today specifically in XR sets us extremely well because we own all the perception, we own all the technologies, and of course the broadest roadmap in the industry for XR products. So I was like, hey, this is a great place. And I think especially now the inclusion of AI makes certain things possible that were just not possible in the past. So great inflection point for our industry in my way.
Definitely. I mean now, I use my cell phone for everything from ordering food to checking my calendar and everything else. And even though I'm a millennial and I guess the Gen Z makes fun of us for still wanting our desktop computer to do certain things, it's like memes on the internet, but it makes sense because XR gives us this seamless access to data that we could never have before. And Qualcomm is set up for that. I mean, I did USC engineering school which is now called Viterbi. So founder of Qualcomm who really was the inventor of being able to have incredible amounts of data streamlined to mobile devices. So yeah, you guys really are set up. So you guys have been the leader in wireless and mobile computing. What was the company's initial vision for XR and how has it evolved under your leadership?
Yeah, but on your previous comment, I'd say, hey, I really look forward to the time when the Gen Betas make fun of the Gen Z's with their spatial computing devices. So, you know, that's I know. Yeah, get rid of that old cell phone. There you go. But coming back to your question, I think the key part over here is that what is a device that can actually in time really start to take some of the functionality of a smartphone? And with Qualcomm, mobile has been so central to us even though we have diversified in a massive way. We're in automotive, we are in XR products, we are in IoT, we are in computing, we are in all those different product lines. But I think the next-gen consumer device is really a spatial computing device. And I think to a great extent some of the popularity that we are seeing with Meta Ray-Bans shows it extremely well, that even with a device that doesn't have full display capabilities today, it really shows the promise of what a device like this can do and people are really flocking to it. It looks good. It also adds to what you want to do in a given day. And I always say probably the best device ever to do agentic AI is basically a smart glass. And I think great credit to Meta and team how they've been able to create this good product, but I think it shows people what a good spatial computing device can do. And that's why from a Qualcomm perspective, we've been very focused on making sure that we are leaders in this space and we continue to make the right investments to be able to make this space successful.
Yeah. No, I mean that's great. Those Ray-Bans, and at the end of the day, from a spatial computing perspective, they don't have a lot of content on them today, but just the minimal amount is so useful. So I know I can't wait till the AI translation has more languages because it's incredibly valuable. And so you touched on AI, what are some of the technological breakthroughs that are making this all possible today and where do you see the biggest impact?
Yeah, you know, I've had this great privilege of basically driving Qualcomm AI strategy for the last six years before I took over the role in the XR business. But the real problem is, I think some of the key challenges that we had with MR have been, right? MR for example has been, there's been a problem with the availability of content. Well, with the inclusion of AI, you can actually start to create that content. The techniques like for example NeRFs and even Gaussian splatting are allowing you to be able to create 3D content quite easily from 2D sources. And I think that in itself really starts to make this happen in a very good way. That's one. Secondly, I think generative AI again allows you to be able to personalize these experiences in an amazing fashion. So imagine what happens today, right? There's a graphics designer, he creates a world which is a virtual world, and you see that, I see that, my 12-year-old daughter sees this too, right? But our likes and dislikes might be very, very different. But with GenAI, if I could basically tap into the likes and dislikes of that consumer, I could figure out what is interesting to them, what textures, what colors, what themes, and then if I could create a world that's much more suited to that person, now you got a personalized virtual world. And I think that really changes the way we interact with it. And it continues to evolve and change as your likes and dislikes evolve. So some of the challenges of MR, I think they're starting to get solved by the inclusion of AI. Another thing has been the ease of being able to, for example, navigate within a virtual world, to have for example an LLM that's integrated into it. You can do a massive job of being able to really just talk to it and be able to navigate through that part of the world. For example, we're working with a company and they do gaming, and we said, hey, these NPCs that you have in the games, they're typically standing over there and they have these lines that they will just say, but I can have a full LLM session with one of these NPCs while the LLM is actually running on my chip. You don't even need the cloud because we have so much on-device AI capability. So you see, if you put in the graphics capability, the LLMs coming in, and the GenAI part, MR gets much, much better. There's a similar analog on the AR side and on the smart glass side, right? The ability for you to have a camera up top that's able to see what you see means that the glass actually is seeing what you see. And that changes the way it can actually do multimodal AI because for multimodal AI, it needs to understand what are you looking at. The context that I'm able to get, if I can feed that into an LLM, the fact that it's daylight right now, the fact that I'm in the office environment, it really changes that response because see, today you go and you ask an LLM a question, it gives the same answer whether I'm asking or an 80-year-old boy is asking that question. That should not be the case, right? So really, I think those challenges start to get solved. Now, like you mentioned, a great use case, right? Translation. I was actually with one of our partners in China and they have come up with these glasses and the whole meeting was in Mandarin and basically the displays were showing me the English translation on the display while I'm wearing those glasses and I didn't have to stop them every 5 minutes to translate for example. It's an amazing use case or you go out to a restaurant in a country where you don't speak the language and you can hold your menu and basically it puts in the translated words on that menu and superimposes it for you. Right? There are so many such very good use cases that take away the friction for a lot of these scenarios. And I think similarly navigation and then I always look at verticals. So if you think from a medical perspective or education perspective or retail perspective, even enterprise perspective, right? There's so many use cases on remote help and remote assistance. Just a massive amount of things that become possible because of the addition of XR. And I think these two are truly symbiotic technologies and they come together in a way that basically is going to really set apart the experiences that consumers really, really want to have.
Definitely. And I want to hit on that content creation piece is really what I think has been holding back the entire XR industry for years, decades, however long you want to go back. And having AI being able to automatically create 3D models. Siemens at CES when we were there announced their AI integration with their CAD products to help automate some of that which is incredible. And then with remote collab, besides healthcare but within industrial manufacturing, I know one of our clients, they have tons of 3D models and they're doing real-time analysis. So the data from the machines at all their clients is feeding into these mixed reality experience to do real-time simulation models and then they're using AI to not only analyze that data to give the client better feedback. They're also using AI to create synthetic data to then run all these different use cases and develop better products and give better advice to their clients. So yeah, it's this convergence of all this technology is so exciting.
I think so and I think XR is a huge beneficiary of this AI advancement that we are seeing and actually AI too, right? When you, like I said earlier, right? I mean, if you're talking with an agentic AI, the best device is a smart glass because you're driving or you're talking, it should be able to do those tasks for you and you can just talk to it. There is no need for a keyboard. There is no need for holding something up. I mean the equivalent of this is that you got to hold your cell phone all day long like this to be able for it to be able to see what you see. But especially enterprise use cases, we have multiple partners, you mentioned Siemens, there are others as well, where I think it's really, there's so much low-hanging fruit that we can just tap into very easily.
Yeah, I really feel like we've gone past the oh, this is exciting and there's true ROI happening within these businesses. And I don't know if there's any case studies you can share of other examples that you guys have helped with.
Yeah. So, we're working actually with a partner that has a lot of oil exploration and all, and you can just imagine that you are able to actually put on these MR or HMD-like device and you can go in and essentially send a person over to this oil rig for example and they need to replace this part. Can you imagine the amount of time that it takes to train that person? But now you can actually have them walk them through step by step and it tells you, hey, take these two screws out first and then you do the next step and the next step and it's really extremely easy. Or an equivalent of this is also we have a company where you could basically be wearing smart glasses, for example, a foreman on the workshop floor and can identify that there are these five security or safety violations at this point in time on the workshop floor that nobody might have noticed, right? So the applications are really many. We have a partner also that does this for aircraft management and aircraft maintenance and they basically send out people where they're able to actually help them replace parts and maintain it by leveraging AR technology and really reduces the amount of training time for them and also allows them to send in many more people than who can actually typically go because they don't need to spend all that time getting trained first.
That's great. And some of the ROI I'm assuming at least that I've talked to people about are cost savings, time savings, training people up faster. I guess being able to have more experts like in the room quote unquote that you can stream in that you could never have before.
Fewer errors for example, right? That's a huge benefit for them because this assistance is there and many of times there are mistakes that are made that can be prevented in a very good way by using these techniques.
Definitely. And my first job was actually at an oil refinery and you do not want to be making mistakes in dangerous environments like that. So yeah, I wish we had this back when I was there. I was a little nervous. But one thing that's important especially with this real-time support is latency and power consumption and network connectivity. These have all been barriers to XR. So how are you all helping overcome these challenges to make this reality?
Yeah, I think what we have been working on for quite some time has been what we call split rendering, right? So now in a way what you can do is there is a lot of rendering for example in some scenarios that may be happening remotely but then with the engines and the compute that we are packing into our MR products now we can actually do massive amount of that on the device. And as you can do that on the device it actually starts to bridge a lot of that gap that you have with latency especially when all of the rendering is happening remotely. Now in this case you could have for example LSR-like functions on the device in the end to be able to give you seamless experience while still being able to stream the data down from a server. But the other thing that people are also looking at is to continue to do more and more processing itself on the device, more rendering on the device. We have the best-in-class graphics engines. We have the best-in-class camera technology for video see-through experiences. We have a very dedicated block inside for computer vision to be able to identify objects to be able to track things and all. And right with that, what you can do is you can actually do more on the device which again helps with the latency and in scenarios where you might have poor connectivity.
Yeah. I mean that's great. And there are certain scenarios where with the DoD they don't want you connected to internet at all and the requirement is you must do everything on device. And it's incredible that you're starting to be able to do that. And then that kind of leads, you guys power so many different headsets. I mean, the XR ecosystem is still pretty fragmented. There's a lot of different platforms, a lot of different hardware. How are you helping to enable a more seamless interoperable ecosystem, which I know there's tons of groups out, we're all trying to push this, but it's a big battle to solve.
