Sesame Street and Star Trek features in new Qualcomm-powered technology

By Joshua Sherman Published January 8, 2013

Image used with permission by copyright holder

For those who missed the Qualcomm keynote this evening, you missed quite the celebrity mix. Between Maroon 5’s Adam Levine, actress Alice Eve, and Sesame Street’s Big Bird, Qualcomm certainly was strutting its stuff in an effort to demonstrate some of the new technology they planned to release in 2013, including several major software developments centered on the real world and mobile devices working together in unison.

While Qualcomm was coy not to mention a new Snapdragon or other big hardware upgrades (we’re betting on the MWC next month), they talked a lot about the “Sixth Sense” of computing, and how it allows you to be informed and in the loop in ways never before possible. This was the introduction to Qualcomm’s presentation of their new Vuforic, and other technology that they hope to have released in time for the summer. While Vuforic is not new, it’s yet to get anywhere near as in-depth a demonstration as Qualcomm showed today.

In one case, Big Bird and a team member of the Sesame Workshop came in and showed off the latest development of Qualcomm’s Vuforic tech in the realm of children’s applications. The app showed how it could recognize text and subsequently help teach a child words. It was an excellent demonstration of Vuforic’s ability to interact with the environment and virtually experience what is otherwise static.

Another case, featuring Alice Eve from the upcoming Star Trek: Into Darkness, was a showoff for the new upcoming Star Trek movie. The movie will feature a new app experience powered by Qualcomm’s technology, allowing users to go on “missions” and add to the overall experience by checking out trailers, visiting certain locations, and more. This is just another example of the sort of tech Qualcomm hopes to bring to consumers once developers bring the tech into full swing.

Finally, Qualcomm decided to show off Adam Levine in a brief Maroon 5 performance before calling it a night. We’re excited to see which devices will be compatible (we guess many given how popular snapdragon is) with this new Qualcomm tech as it begins to debut in the coming months, and developers get a hold of the highly anticipated SDK in the spring.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Joshua Sherman is a contributor for Digital Trends who writes about all things mobile from Apple to Zynga. Josh pulls his…

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