Motorola and Verizon made a chonky 5G neckband. Here’s what it does.

Today’s AR/VR headsets have generally slimmed down in size compared to early generation products, but they’re still quite large though. However, Motorola and Verizon have revealed a rather interesting solution to the problem.

The two companies announced a 5G neckband that will power an AR/VR headset or glasses. A brief look at the product shows an iPod-like device slung around the person’s neck. It’s not quite as huge as a St Bernard dog’s barrel of alcohol, but it’s certainly chunky nonetheless.

The idea is that headset makers can offer slimmer and lighter designs as they wouldn’t need to integrate a processor and other components into the headset itself.

What powers the neckband?

Speaking of internal components, the neckband comes equipped with a cutting-edge Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset to power AR or VR headsets.  It’s also equipped with the aforementioned 5G connectivity, ostensibly to hand off XR processing to other devices (e.g. cloud services).

According to Engadget, the device is also equipped with a 5,000mAh battery, a touchpad, USB-C, DisplayPort 1.4 connectivity, a gyroscope, and an accelerometer.

There’s no word on a commercial release, but the two companies claimed that they’re working on AR and VR applications and will share more details in the coming months.