Qualcomm was demoing the VR kit at GDC 2018 and there are plenty of updates and new features that were brought on with the powerful Snapdragon 845 SoC, including better eye tracking, room-scale six degrees of freedom (6DoF) with “inside-out” simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), Qualcomm's Adreno Foveation rendering, and a new boundary system.

According to what could be seen at GDC 2018, the Snapdragon 845 VR development kit is based on a 2560x1440 resolution (1280x1440 per eye) 60Hz screen, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. It also comes with two monochrome cameras for room tracking as well as two monochrome VGA cameras for eye-tracking. While these specifications are pretty much what you would expect some new features are quite interesting.

The first thing that makes the new Snapdragon 845 VR development kit special is the pair of eye-tracking cameras, powered by Tobii eye-tracking technology, which, combined with Adreno Foveation, promises to bring better performance, better power efficiency as well as improved visual quality by using "foveated rendering" to reduce image quality in outside the eye focus, or render higher quality part to whatever the eye is looking at.

Another big thing is the aforementioned room-scale six degrees of freedom (6DoF) with “inside-out” simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), which means it does not need external hardware, making it truly wireless. Qualcomm also mentioned the new boundary system which will allow developers to detect boundaries of the real-world space.

Qualcomm also noted that it has teamed up with HTC to extend support for the HTC Vive Wave VR SDK on the Snapdragon 845 Virtual Reality Development Kit.

According to Qualcomm, the new Snapdragon 845 Virtual Reality Development Kit, both the HMD and the SDK, should be available in the second quarter of 2018.