Vice President of Product Management of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., Qualcomm
Qualcomm Keynote: The Era of Personal AI and Endless Realities with Ziad Asghar, VP & GM of XR
At AWE, Qualcomm’s Ziad Asghar delivered a definitive vision for the future of computing: we are moving rapidly away from smartphone screens toward an agent-centric world. If the personal computer was defined by the keyboard and the smartphone by touch, the new human-machine interface belongs to multimodal AI agents.
To transition from concept to scale, Qualcomm introduced the custom silicon, developer toolkits, and ecosystem partnerships required to give these agents physical eyes and ears.
The major updates from the presentation include:
Snapdragon Reality Elite: Qualcomm’s new flagship p...
About Ziad Asghar
At AWE in June 2026, Ziad Asghar delivered a keynote in which he described a shift from smartphone‑centric computing toward an “agent‑centric world,” with multimodal AI agents as the new human‑machine interface. He stated that 2026 is “the year of the agents” and argued that devices such as smart glasses, AI pendants, and earbuds with cameras are best suited for this era. Asghar announced the Snapdragon Reality Elite platform, which he called “the most integrated beast of a platform for mixed reality processing” and “the most advanced platform out there today for mixed reality products.” He also introduced what he said was the world’s first multimodal AI model running primarily on a smart glass, adding that it is not offloaded to a phone, host device, or cloud. Asghar discussed the Snapdragon Start program, describing it as a “scalable turnkey AI‑ready toolkit” that allows partners to bring their ideas and agents to market across different device types. He highlighted partnerships including eyewear brands and noted that the program had 33 members across four cohorts. During the keynote, Qualcomm’s partner Play for Dream showcased a next‑generation product, the Jim X, powered by Snapdragon Reality Elite. As
Transcript (14 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
Z
Ziad Asghar0:07
Good morning everyone. Wasn't that a great device specs that Evan just shared? Really, really exciting times by the way. Look, I think Ori and now Evan have set this up amazingly well. I have a lot to share with you today. I think there are a couple of trends that are unbelievably amazing at this point in time. The devices that you all have been working on for the longest time, being able to understand what the environment around a device is about, to be able to reason based on that, and then to be able to act. That's the vision of a personal AI device. That's the vision of what people call a spatial AI device. And that's what we all have been working on for the longest time. But there's an amazing ingredient that has come in recently, which is AI. And you guys can see with the advent of AI agents, it's really completely changing how we use these devices. But this group of people are the best positioned to be able to take advantage of this revolution. So we all lived in the world where mobile phone has been at the center of it. It is the center of all the information. It's the center of all and everything that we do from productivity to the activities that we do at home. But guess what? We're moving towards an agent-centric world where agent becomes at the center of all the activities that we do. I really want to say that 2026 is really the year of the agents. We have multiple different types of agents. We have agents that are great for working for what we do at home. There are agents that are great for what we do at work. There are agents that are great for medical, for health care, for education, for all those different verticals. And I believe that as we build these unique devices, we actually bring these agents to these devices, and we give them eyes and ears. We give them the ability to be able to see. We give them the ability to be able to understand, to reason, and then to act. And that is the opportunity that is in front of us today. Now, there's a change that's occurring in the computer architecture with the amazing sensors and the capabilities that we have built on. We can bring in the environment in. The context that we are able to bring is what makes AI and it is what makes agents more and more curated and personalized for each of us. It's not just something that's in the cloud somewhere without having the insights. It sees what you see. It hears what you hear. And that makes these devices and these capabilities truly unique. And then by combining it with these reasoning models, with world models, we're actually able to create unique experiences that basically are configured for these different verticals that we are all talking about today. So, just to really encapsulate this challenge that we have in front of us. We have all seen these transitions. The personal computer, it was enabled by the keyboard and the mouse. The phone, it was enabled by touch. That was the human-machine interface. If today the human-machine interface is AI and agents, what is the device that is best suited to that world? And it's those devices. It is the devices like smart glasses and AI pendants and AI necklaces. And it is basically earbuds with cameras on them. And it is really critical for us to be able to bring in the understanding of the environment. And that's where all the perception technologies that this room has been working on can now form a part of the human-machine interface for these new unique devices. And that's what makes me very, very excited. In terms of the amount of AI capabilities that we have baked into these devices, today I'm very excited to be talking about the world's first multimodal AI model running on a smart glass. It's not being offloaded to the phone. It's not being offloaded to a host device. It's not being offloaded to the cloud, either. It's running primarily on the glass. And actually, you can go and see this in our booth. Four different models running concurrently, taking your speech, converting it to text, taking that text, and bringing in the image, tokenizing it, and then putting that into a language model, and then producing the output back as speech. That's kind of what we're able to do.
Because of these capabilities of AR1 and AR1 Plus, this is the traction that we see today. You also just saw what Evan shared. I couldn't put that on. Would have loved to do it. But there is a plethora of smart glasses out there, and there is a whole pipeline of a lot more that's coming as well. But more interestingly, look at the AI hearables. Look at the wearable AI products. These are not products that even we were thinking about until recently, but it is our consumers and our partners that are coming in, and they're saying they want an AI-native device that allows them to be able to do these amazing experiences. So, we are super excited about all the traction that we're seeing in this space. And thank you for all the partnerships across this room, as well. Similarly, very excited about the work we're doing with Google and Samsung to really be able to drive Android XR forward, as well. Amazing amount of traction there, as well. So, thank you for the great work there. But to put it all together, this is not one device. I think it's not even just smart glass, and it might actually be more than what I'm showing over there, too. So, it might actually even be more than that. But really, the vision is exactly what I think Ori and what Evan talked about, right? The vision really is to be able to bring in this myriad of agents, to bring in these unique ideas that many of us haven't thought as we haven't thought about as Qualcomm as we design these new experiences and new platforms. To be able to make that reality real, I'm very excited today to be sharing with you the Snapdragon Start program.
This is the scalable turnkey AI ready toolkit. So, bring your amazing ideas, bring your amazing agents and use cases and we will be able to offer the complete hardware, the complete software and allow you to be able to scale to any different kind of device. This starts with first of all having the tiniest tiniest module to be able to integrate everything that you need inside to be able to make a smart glass work. Then it has a software that runs on the host and it's a software that runs on the glass and then of course scaling partners that will allow us to scale this great product. So, again, one of my great great pleasures to be sharing with you. This is the first module, a complete system in package that allows you to be able to make a smart glass.
It is good that it's tiny by the way. If it were bigger, that'd be a problem. But this is really the most unique, the most optimized Snapdragon AR1 platform out there. It's 8.9 by 42 mm, which is way smaller than anything else that you see in a smart glass today. And you can see this is a complete system in package. It has all the capabilities needed and that's why we want you guys, the builders and the tinkers to be able to bring in their ideas, to be able to use this platform to create new and amazing experiences and products out there. So now, if you have a module like this, you can make it fit into any device, a glass of any different type or shape or any other form factor for that matter. And then to truly be able to scale it, we're working with our partners like Applied Materials and Thunder Comm, and of course working with scaling partners like Georgian and Pegatron to not just do AR glasses, but also do monocular glasses and binocular glasses. So, we'll have all of those options to be able to create these amazing experiences really coming from the group that we have in this room today. And to really drive this forward, actually we have gone ahead and worked with one of our partners. This is again a really an amazing interaction and a great partnership that we have created. So, gives me a lot of pleasure to actually announce the partnership we have with Inspecs Group PLC. They have multiple different glasses. These guys know how to build glasses with multiple different brands. And we want to be able to work with them to take the Start program, and they'll be the leaders in basically driving Start program with us. And I think it opens up amazing amount of opportunities. So, to talk more about it, I actually wanted to share a message from Robin Totterman, who's the founder and executive chairman of Inspecs Group. Please have a listen.
R
Robin Totterman8:58
Ziad, thank you. And thank you to Qualcomm for this partnership. Today marks an exciting moment for Inspecs. Qualcomm's investment and what we're building together creates significant opportunities for both businesses. It's especially exciting to be discussing this at AWE because what we're talking about is not incremental innovation, it's the beginning of a new category. For those unfamiliar with Inspecs, we're UK-headquartered global eyewear company operating in more than 80 countries and supplying around 80,000 retailers and enterprise customers. I founded the business in 1988, and since then we've built a company that designs, licenses, develops, manufactures, and distributes eyewear worldwide. We work with leading retailers, enterprise customers, and global brands reaching millions of customers. At our core, we're craftsmen who create glasses people actually want to wear. And that matters. Because if smart eyewear is going to succeed, it has to start there. Across our portfolio, we serve multiple brands, styles, and categories. From premium to accessible, from fashion to performance. What excites us about the Snapdragon Start program is that it enables us to introduce something entirely new across that portfolio without compromising what makes each brand unique. And that's the real shift. We're not simply adding technology to eyewear. We're redefining what eyewear can be. Being the lead eyewear partner in Start is a major step forward because it addresses two challenges that have limited this category. First, identity. We no longer need to force technology into a single design. We can integrate it naturally across multiple brands, styles, and use cases. Second, speed. We can move from concept to product far faster. That is when scale becomes real. None of this happens without the right partner. Qualcomm provides the technology, modules, and AI capabilities that makes this possible at scale. Just as importantly, it accelerates innovation, shortens development cycles, lowers barriers, and speeds execution. For us, this is not a theoretical partnership. It's an engine for bringing real products to market. We're incredibly optimistic about where this is going. We will bring intelligent eyewear to consumers and enterprise users around the world. And you will begin seeing our first products enter the market later this year. This is only the beginning of what we believe will be a significant shift for both our industry and the broader technology landscape. Thank you again to Qualcomm for its faith in us, and thank you all for your time. Ziad, back to you.
Z
Ziad Asghar11:50
Thank you, Robin. Great to see. And by the way, this is the brand portfolio that InWith has. We're very, very excited about working with them to be able to create these new experiences, new devices, and a whole new slew of new smart glasses and capabilities as well. Now, not to just stop over there, I have more to share. So, you know, we talked about the ring to be able to control the smart glass last year. I'm excited to be sharing the second-generation smart ring controller, and this one has amazing amount of capability. It has the Snapdragon S7 Plus inside it, which means that it can do Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity back to the smart glass. It also has full AI interactions capability, with a microphone built into it, with full health sensing, and hand gestures and control for devices with full three-and-six-degrees-of-freedom control. So, really an amazing product as well to be able to drive forward more and more adoption of these kinds of form factors. Thank you. And you can actually try it out in our booth as well. We have a great demo showing exactly how you can use a product like this. All right. So, talked a lot about smart glasses in the smaller form factors for spatial intelligence devices. But truly, the best experience for the most immersive type of experiences in virtual worlds, there is no replacement to an amazing mixed reality device as well. Now, if you look at all the traction that we're seeing today, it's amazing across our partners like Meta and Pico and Play For Dream, Samsung, Valve, and Vivo. Amazing devices, amazing experiences. And for you guys, especially at AWE, we've actually worked with our partner Abbott to introduce and to create the world's first purpose-built video game for blood donation. So, if you have any anxiety around blood donation, this is AWE, right? So, you have the ability, they are on site to be able to experience this and also do a good thing, which is to donate blood, as well. Additionally, our XR Sports Alliance program continues to move forward at a very good speed. On the right, you can see the kind of experiences that we're bringing in with using MR and the amazing immersive technologies that we have built in with our partner Fees. Again, continuing to work with our key partners, Exceedo and HBS. But, the really amazing part I wanted to share with you is we have a new cohort of partners for XR Sports Alliance, including partners like Manchester United, Specs, Pico, Antigravity, and many more. And with this, we now have about 33 members across four different cohorts. This is really amazing. It's really amazing critical mass at this point in time for these kinds of experiences. So, yeah, I'm still setting it up for something pretty impressive here. So, here's what I wanted you to really talk about today. I'm super stoked to be sharing with you the output of the work of thousands of engineers at Qualcomm to be able to now take the mixed reality experiences to a whole different level. Please take a look.
There it is, guys. The most integrated beast of a platform for mixed reality processing. I'm very, very excited to see what our partners and everybody is going to be able to do with this, but this is the most advanced platform out there today for mixed reality products. Thank you. All right. This is truly designed for premium mixed reality experiences from the ground up. It is longer lasting, sleeker, and cooler devices that we can enable with it, and it's designed for gen AI. Jumping into a few of the details, this platform is the first one to bring Adreno sliced architecture onto the XR side. And if you look at the data, we can do 60% higher performance at the same level of power as our last platform, or we can do 64% lower power at the same performance level. You can do all those complex use cases and the complex rendering experiences that you want to be able to build on mixed reality products. Same time we've enhanced ray tracing capabilities to be able to bring in those realistic lighting and images and reflections and shadows to be able to create those amazing experiences as well. On the CPU side, we have actually enhanced the capability a lot as well. We can do 30% higher performance at the same power level or 45% lower power at the same performance level compared to our previous generation XR2 Gen2 platform. And what's very important in these products is video see-through quality. So we're really focused very heavily on video see-through quality. We have improved the pixel-to-pixel latency by 10% and reduced the power by 33% and with inline spatial denoising and many other techniques, this is what we are able to do comparing it to another platform that's there available on the market at this time. Much, much better image quality for video see-through. And this is possible by using platforms or blocks like Eva, which is our engine for visual analytics. We've enhanced the depth from stereo and at the same time we've enabled much lower power 3D reconstruction. We've added two new accelerators also for 3D point cloud and triangulation and 3D reconstruction and meshing. And with these upgrades, here is what you get. You get amazingly superb 3D reconstruction that you can see on one side, but the same time much, much more granularity on the depth from stereo that we're able to get on the mixed reality platform. Now, this also is designed for AI. So, this has the Hexagon NPU engine where we increase the performance by 160 percent at the same power level as the previous generation. And you can see the comparison with the other platform that's there on the market at this time, we're about 25% higher on trillions of operations per second that you can do for AI processing. So, really a beast in terms of being able to create these new experiences like NPCs in games, to be able to do 3D content creation, to be able to do actual Gaussian splatting. So, actually if you walk over to our booth, you will see a full 3D avatar created using Gaussian splats, all of it running on the Snapdragon Reality Elite. Please check it out. It's actually connected to a large language model. It will talk back at you. So, please do try it out. With this engine, we can do almost 45 tokens per second for a language model or 1.7 seconds to create a completely new image. Here is what we can do with it. Please take a look at this demo. Here is what we are able to do. We can take an image, drag in another image to it. It uses basically spatial diffusion model to be able to recreate that image on the fly. And you can see how quickly it's able to do that, literally in quarter of a second. We can recreate an image in quarter of a second with the shape that you're dragging on over there. That's how you create those amazing virtual worlds, folks. And then at the same time with the much better power consumption, we are able to reduce the temperature. So, these will allow 12° lower temperature on devices for the same load, 20% longer battery life as well. And we work with any type of form factor, whether tethered or all-in-one. And this, in a nutshell, is Snapdragon Reality Elite, the best platform out there for mixed reality processing at this time. Thank you. Now, what I'd like to do is to actually call up some of our partners who have really been working very hard on making Snapdragon taking the Snapdragon Reality Elite and creating products for it. So, this is PlayForDream, and I'd like to invite their founder, Huang Feng, to share their vision with us. Huang?
H
Huang Feng22:02
Hello, everyone. I'm from PlayForDream. We are a company focused on spatial computing with a 7-year history. In the past few years, we have launched the VR 1, VR 2, and the PlayForDream MR. All powered by Qualcomm. Each generation brought us one step closer to our vision for the future of AR spatial computing. Today, we are excited to continue our partnership with Qualcomm and introduce to you our next generation product, Dream Max. This product is powered by Snapdragon Reality Elite. Dream Max will be lighter, more comfortable, and more powerful. This is another exciting milestone in our partnership with Qualcomm and we can't wait to share it with the world. Thank you.
Z
Ziad Asghar23:57
Thank you, Mr. Hong. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right. And now we have another one of our key partners. Very, very excited to be calling them onto the stage, which is Google and XREAL. Would like to invite Hugo Swart, senior director Android XR ecosystem at Google, and Chi Xu, founder and CEO of XREAL.
Hey, Chi. How are you? This one. So, I'd like to have Hugo basically share some thoughts about, you know, what we've been working together on this platform, but it's an amazing platform. Would love to hear more from you.
H
Hugo Swart24:33
Well, thank you, Ziad. Thank you, Qualcomm, for inviting us. It's a very exciting day for our collaboration. Actually, you know, I want to take us back 10 years. It was a very important moment in XR history. Standalone VR was born. That was the first industry's standalone VR reference design. It shifted spatial computing from a PC tethered niche into a mainstream untethered only one headset. Today, I believe we're crossing another milestone. The next major XR device architecture. And this time, we're not talking about hardware only, but a unified silicon and operating system foundation. It is designed to empower the entire XR industry to innovate faster and scale together. That's the promise of Android XR with Snapdragon. That is our joint Google and Qualcomm vision. A unified, highly collaborative XR ecosystem. And the brand new Snapdragon Reality Elite that Ziad just introduced us was actually customized and optimized from the ground up to run Android XR. And very important, to power our split compute architecture. And that is why today is such a landmark moment. It represents the collaboration with Qualcomm taking to the next level. And at the very core of this co-development strategy, there are three major pillars. The first one is the advanced technology integration. We have optimized Google software directly into Qualcomm's silicon, including spatial algorithms, multimedia pipelines, and leading edge AI models. Second, reference designs. To lower the barrier for new hardware partners, Google and Qualcomm co-develop the blueprints for new devices, the reference designs. And third, the technology supplier ecosystem. We're aligning with major optics, display, camera, memory, sensor companies, many of you in this room, so that our OEM partners can more easily create differentiated specs at competitive price points. 10 years ago, standalone VR was born. Today, with Qualcomm, Google, and Xreal, we're launching the next era of lightweight, everyday spatial computing, and opening the gates for the entire ecosystem to scale. With that, I'll pass it back to Ziad and Chi. Thank you.
Z
Ziad Asghar27:54
All right. I'd like Chi to share some thoughts as well. Very excited about what we're doing together.
C
Chi Xu27:59
Absolutely. Thank you for having me today. So, again, 7 years ago, it was at the same stage. We launched our first ever product, if you guys remember, Nreal Light back then. Back then, we're a young company having a very simple belief. We think that the future of computing it shouldn't be limited to your smartphone, it shouldn't be on your desk, it shouldn't be limited to the heavy headset. At some point, it should be wearable, spatial, and natural. And 7 years later, first of all, we're lucky I can still be here. And, you know, the biggest difference is, you know, today we feel like this vision is getting way closer. You know, the future of the computing it should definitely be wearable, spatial, and most importantly, powered by AI. And this time, we're not alone. We have two incredible partners to do this with us. Google and Qualcomm. At XREAL, we can bring years of experience building lightweight optical see-through glasses, AI spatial display, and AI hardware design. And Qualcomm can bring this very great silicon architecture, Snapdragon Reality Elite. The performance, the power efficiency, and the AI capability is the ultimate kind of a foundation to make this form factor possible. And Google can bring Android XR. Can bring Gemini, and also one of the best developer ecosystem in the world. So, with all those kind of components put together, finally we think we have all the solutions, right? We have this product. So, that's why we're just so happy, you know, Project Aura is no longer a project anymore. Today, we officially announce our first spatial computing glasses powered by Android XR, XREAL Aura. It is truly one of its kind. I'm just so excited. Finally, it's coming. And, you know, this is a teamwork. This is a great teamwork. We can bring this lightweight, true immersion type of glasses, 70° field of view, really lightweight, less than 100 g glasses. And we have the split architecture with the power of, you know, Snapdragon Reality Elite on the puck, and XREAL 1S in the glasses. And most importantly, on top of that, this time, we have a ecosystem to play with. Yeah. So, yes, it's on a different level. So, the speed, multitasking, the power, the AI, you know, all those kind of performance is going to make the best of the best. And also, when we're talking about the whole ecosystem because of Android XR, we have millions of apps at day one. And we'll have hundreds of applications native for XR in day one as well. Let me just give you a sneak peek about some of the really, really interesting XR applications on Android XR. Demio, you know, it's one of the really interesting tabletop games. And we have this project Hail Mary. And we also have Fox Sports running XR version of day one as well. And on top of this is one of my favorite, The Fallout, will also come into Aura. Yeah. And also, Asteroid by 30 Ninjas will also be available at day one. So, this is already a big list. And we're not limiting there. There's definitely more to come when we're launching this product. So, today we're also announcing the reservation for actual Aura starts today. And we'll have two different options. So, the first one is the founder priority pass. It is limited to 2,000 reservations globally. And this will guarantee you day one delivery. So, if you are early adopter, if you're developer, this is the right one to go. And the other one is a limited time offer, a launch credit. So, if you reserve that for $99 today, you'll get $199 applied to your final purchase when Aura is available. So, the first wave of Aura will be available in US, Europe, UK, Japan, and South Korea. So, if you are a believer of spatial computing, this is the right form factor. Reserve now. And also, you know, you guys today you have the privilege to try actual Aura first hand at Qualcomm's booth. Thank you. Thank you. And most importantly, actual Aura will officially coming this fall. So, it is happening. Okay. So, yeah. Perfect. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Thank you.
Z
Ziad Asghar33:03
Thank you. Thanks much. Really thank. And I think you should really go to the booth and try out the Aura as well, Project Aura. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So, now to wrap it up, like I said, I did have a lot to share, but this is all amazingly exciting stuff. And really want to thank all the partners and everything. With the inclusion of Snapdragon Reality Elite, this portfolio of products, this is the largest portfolio of products out there for doing spatial intelligent devices or for doing personal AI devices. And I'm super excited with what you guys are going to be building by leveraging this portfolio. Look, all the ingredients are there. We have the agents, we have the platform, we have the Start program, we have Reality Elite to be able to make these agentic experiences a reality. Thank you for listening. Appreciate it. Thank you.