Brian Vogelsang (Qualcomm) on Drawing on Lessons of the Past to Build Today’s Headworn AR Ecosystem

Brian Vogelsang is the Senior Director of Product at Qualcomm focused on Snapdragon Spaces, an XR developer platform for headworn augmented reality. This AR development kit is built on open standards and meant to complement the efforts by Niantic’s Lightship and others.

Brain started his career as the CTO and co-founder of a very early internet service provider startup. He then joined Qualcomm in the mid-1990s, back when it was still a young company. There he focused initially on IT Infrastructure and Security before shifting his focus to the very early days of mobile app development within Qualcomm.

For the last four years, Brain has been working with Hugo Swart and other members of the Qualcomm team on developing Qualcomm’s strategy, products, and ecosystem around Augmented and Virtual Reality.

In this conversation, Brian shares how his long history at Qualcomm gave him a front row seat to the development of the mobile app ecosystem in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as well as the smartphone ecosystem a decade later. He pulls some lessons forward to the AR ecosystem that Qualcomm is helping build today, and looks ahead to 2022.

We go on to discuss the differences in stand alone vs companion devices (or “viewers" as Qualcomm calls them). And of course we talk about the recently announced Snapdragon Spaces, which is built on the Open XR standards and incorporates innovation around user and environmental understanding.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.