[Music] covering the week's top tech stories with a slight linux bias an ar smart viewer by qualcomm is designed to let you pin your virtual screens right on the wall of your office while you work i'll tell you all about it in a moment but first if you enjoy your weekly tech news with a slight linux bias become part of our fleet choose your rank at patreon.com category5 also make sure you subscribe to our youtube channel and if you like this video please be sure to give it a big thumbs up don't forget to click the bell to catch the stories we cover each week so on with the story a new type of augmented reality glasses called the xr1 smart viewer have been introduced by chip maker qualcomm and are set to be released by mid-2021 the ar glasses connect by usbc to either a pc or a smartphone looking much like sunglasses the smart viewer is actually quite like lightweight unlike gaming ar counterparts which are rather heavy and bulky rather than being a self-contained product the xr1 is intended to be a must-have accessory the xr-1 is designed with features such as spatial awareness and hand tracking using two 1920x1080 led displays that have a 90 hertz refresh rate there's an array of cameras to provide to provide virtual overlay while also detecting planes in whatever physical territory you're in this makes it so you can pin up virtual windows on the wall of your room or office so that you can view multiple pc displays in a row all at once you can also set a virtual object down on a table and use gesture control to interact with it there is a however a limited range of view just 45 degrees which is somewhat similar to hololens 2 by microsoft the lightweight design of the xr1 smart viewer was accomplished by programming it to perform only some of its tasks with built-in electronics while counterpoising the rest with an external computer device the push for ar glasses has been a qualcomm objective for a couple of years now as they believe it could energize the budding f 5g cellular market by creating both a demand and incentive for mixed reality apps that are high bandwidth as yet ar glasses are still far from mainstream but that may all change this year as the xr1 and a few other competitor products all become available around the same time in mid-2021 just last year facebook announced that they'd be entering the ar hardware realm in 2021 through the release of ray-ban smart glasses with limited ar-like features and lenovo a chinese multinational technology company has also announced a soon to be released product called think reality a3 glasses which are based on the xr1 reference design there's also a rumor that apple might be working on a high-end ar vr headset too i can't believe that we're going to see this tech this year i know it's like man i never thought i'd see this kind of tech in my lifetime you joked as we were talking there that this is very minority report and when becca was saying about how it uses gesture control and everything to be able to control it just absolutely makes me think the same thing what i love about this is that we've seen attempts at ar in the past and it's always in my in my recollection it's always been trying to add augmented reality to our existing environment in such a way that it changes the paradigm of the user's interaction that's right which if you think about it is is interesting i mean ar is going to lead to that but i think because companies have been driving to shift the paradigm as they introduce the new technology the adoption of that technology is poor because users don't want to change that's right yeah i don't want to change but if you give me ar glasses that can give me the same user interface the same paradigm of taking my computer monitor and placing it on the wall that to me makes sense so i don't have to learn new ways to control i don't have to um you know like the ar that we've seen so far has all been this whole shift in the way that the interaction occurs yeah but i'm still able to control it just like my normal computers right absolutely that's i mean the cool thing about this story is the fact that a we're seeing this this year this year not only from qualcomm but becca was mentioning that we're seeing we're gonna see this from other yeah uh technology firms as well yeah it's true it's very cool but but the second thing is the fact that um it's not just the visual aspect i mean like you see it with different games and stuff on your phone where they use you know augmented reality and it it does its automated thing yeah this is fully interactive because it is your computer and that yeah that is very neat to me and i kind of the way my brain works i'm i'm waiting to hear about the first person who goes oh hey take a look at this people look what are you talking about put on your qualcomm glasses i love also the privacy aspect of this absolutely so as i'm doing think about this in an office environment where you're like a medical office for example so now the the technician can be working on a screen that only they can see because it only exists for that person that's wearing those glasses they don't have to worry about other people seeing the the screen or anything like that um and and then qualcomm also kind of goes on to say yes that's what we're doing but there's also going to be a certain level of ar as well yeah so then there will be that other available as maybe part of the software as well oh it makes sense so here's a great way to use it but we may also offer you some other things and it's 1080p times two yeah which is great so we're going to have good resolution it's going to be fantastic yeah now if i can go slightly to the i don't know what i call negative but the dark side well the one thing about this that i don't like uh-oh is that you have to be tethered to your phone or your computer it's not i like that it's not bluetooth or or or any sort of wire so to me that says low latency well give me that says i can tap into the ai chip of my phone sure extremely fast interaction which just doesn't have their phone in their pocket jeff fair enough but it's the fact that oh it's a cable so how many people are going to like oh they go to take your glasses off grab your phone like i'm thinking that like the connection standpoints i mean you know you plug in your i mean this phone i i can wirelessly charge it which is beautiful because yeah the amount of times that i've gotten to pick it up it's like oh i'm tethered next thing you know you break the connection fair enough so it's little things like that where i'm like man they've gone so far and they just missed this one element no i don't believe they missed it at all jeff i think so i think that the tether is a brilliant way to keep this accessible from a usability standpoint yeah so rather than having a big ar glasses that wraps my head and it has the computer built in i'm thinking of you microsoft all it is is like a pair of sunglasses because that really looks like sunglasses because it allows you to use the processor power of this guy i don't have to have this size thing strapped to my head yeah fair enough all right all right i'll give you that point thank you i'm still not a fan of the cable your comments your thoughts cable or no cable would you rather the big honking thing that microsoft makes i think it can be done without the big honking thing it probably will be but let's start somewhere jeff fine i want the future now now now now now that's right yes what do you think about the concept of lightweight ar glasses for an office-like setting would you want to use them in your line of work do you think they will create greater efficiency in work or just greater distraction let us know your thoughts in the comments below from the category 5 tv newsroom i'm becca ferguson thanks for watching you