Qualcomm has made no secret of its belief that smart glasses are going to be a significant future product, and during the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California this week, the chipmaker shared its vision for the sector, demonstrating eyewear using its new Snapdragon processor. According to the company, the AR1+ Gen 1 is 26 percent smaller than earlier chips and runs artificial intelligence tools independent of Internet or smartphone connectivity. Qualcomm’s goal is to help smart glasses become “fully independent devices” that can do processing and complete agentic tasks with or without connectivity.

Qualcomm SVP of XR & Spatial Computing Ziad Asghar, who performed the live demo at AWE, later wrote in a news post that the demonstration showed “a generative AI assistant running completely on smart glasses — without the aid of a phone or the cloud,” ushering in a new era for wearables.

“On Tuesday, as I stood on stage at AWE USA, the world’s largest XR conference, I chatted with an AI assistant through a pair of RayNeo X3 Pro smart glasses powered by Snapdragon technology — where AI inferencing is done on the glasses without relying on the cloud or an Internet connection,” Asghar said, noting that “in the near future, I will be able to leave my phone in my pocket or in the car and just wear my smart glasses during a supermarket run.”

That was the premise of Asghar’s AWE demo, in which he asked the glasses-based AI assistant for help with ingredients with a recipe. In response, the AI assistant — running Meta’s small language model Llama 1B — understood the request and provided the necessary information through audio and text displayed in the lenses.

VentureBeat calls the demo “a world’s first: an Autoregressive Generative AI model running completely on a pair of smart glasses.” The Snapdragon AR1+ Gen 1 processor can potentially revolutionize smart glasses, with the chip’s small size and ability to achieve enhanced image quality and power improvement running SLMs, VB adds.

Likewise, Tom’s Guide calls the AR1+ Gen 1 chip a “smart glasses breakthrough” in that it bypasses the methods typically used to allow smart glasses to do computer processing: cloud connectivity, connection to a smartphone or PC, or use of a “puck” — a secondary computational device dedicated to powering glasses, as used in Meta’s Project Orion.

Bypassing all that, the new Qualcomm tech produced low-latency results that were “simply incredible,” according to Tom’s, which suggests the processor is well-timed to help Android XR take off.