Pico Reportedly Developing Slim & Light Mixed Reality ‘Goggles’ to Rival Next-Gen Meta Headset

They of course could, but I doubt they would in the current market. For the foreseeable future the vast majority of XR devices will be Quest-like all-in-ones simply due to price sensitive buyers. Devices physically separating compute from display will be significantly more expensive both due to extra tech required and selling in lower numbers, and creating extra silicon for such a niche isn't what Qualcomm mostly selling to the smartphone mass market usually does.

Even if they released an R1-like SoC just to handle sensor data, without the CPU/GPU for rendering VR, I doubt that they would release a separate XR line that drops the camera ports and ISP image processor/DSP digital signal processor. They'd instead still offer the regular XR SoCs for use in the compute puck, with the camera ports being unused, again because low numbers won't justify a separate product. The XR SoC themselves are mostly reconfigured Snapdragons dropping high performance and low power cores, produced on a cheaper Samsung process node, still inheriting pretty much everything from the SD optimized for phones, even if those parts aren't used/useful for XR.

So even if Qualcomm releases an R1 like SoC, you'd still need a full XR SoC on the puck, again driving up cost and lowering unit numbers. It is of course always possible that Qualcomm provides a dedicated two chip solution despite it being uneconomical simply for strategic reasons, but it seems more likely that they will focus on their large number AR series SoCs for smart glasses and XR series SoCs for all-in-one XR HMDs.

Anyone wanting to deviate from this will have to improvise, either by creating custom silicon or reusing something else. Meta merging video streams on Quest Pro with an FPGA to compensate for lacking camera ports is such a solution, as an FPGA is more expensive per unit than a mass produced SoC, but can be "programmed" for specific uses, so it is an economic solution for low unit number devices. Meta also used a Snapdragon 6XX intended for mid-range phones in each Touch Pro controller, which includes features like a GPU, display drivers and tons more, all useless in a controller. But it also features a Hexagon DSP, the same family as used in the XR, so Meta could connect lowres tracking cameras to the SD6XX camera ports and run their regular Quest tracking software that has been running on Hexagon DSPs since Quest 1. Certainly not an optimal solution regarding matching the SoC to the actual compute requirements, but extremely efficient considering Meta's development costs for an again low volume product.

Technically there is no urgent need for Qualcomm to release an R1-like chip for use with external compute pucks, when a company like Pico or Meta could simply use a second XR-SoC on the HMD, with the GPU/CPU partly disabled and/or severally underclocked to lower power consumption, only reading sensor data and pushing it to the main XR SoC on the compute puck at full speed driven by larger batteries. Using two not exactly cheap XR SoCs would of course be expensive, so maybe we'll see another round of FPGA or midrange SD SoC hacks, or custom ASICs if compute pucks turn out to sell a lot more than I'd expect them to.