Technology firm Qualcomm has joined with Tencent’s Honor of Kings studio, Tencent AI Lab and Chinese smartphone manufacturer Vivo to create a new AI initiative for mobile games.

Named Project Imagination, the initiative will use Qualcomm’s fourth generation AI engine among other technologies before being powered outside of the cloud through Vivo’s iQOO smartphones.

Utilising the tech, developers can optimise the performance and user experiences of their games. Tencent will be one of the first to take advantage of the technologies capabilities with Honor of Kings.  

Driving forward

“Qualcomm Technologies has been committed to driving forward the application and implementation of on-device AI, and seeking to create rich use cases and innovative user experiences such as gaming in collaboration with our AI ecosystem partners using the advanced Qualcomm AI Engine on Snapdragon mobile platforms,” said Qualcomm China chairman Frank Meng.

“Our technologies have already driven a broad range of AI use cases. Through this work between four parties, we are looking forward to exploring more innovative AI features and applications on devices.”

Tencent AI Lab director of technology Qiang Fu added: “Tencent AI Lab focuses on combining foundational research with applications and delivering on the vision ‘Make AI Everywhere’ by improving AI perception, decision and creation capabilities. One of the key elements in the journey from building an AI ecosystem to making AI at scale is, we believe, to facilitate distributed intelligence from the cloud to the wireless edge.

“With the advent of the 5G era, we are excited about the cooperation with Qualcomm Technologies, Vivo and the Honor of Kings, as it will help drive AI to further move from the cloud to the wireless edge and the device.”