[HN Gopher] Galaxy XR: The first Android XR headset
___________________________________________________________________
Galaxy XR: The first Android XR headset
Related: https://www.samsung.com/us/xr/galaxy-xr/galaxy-xr/,
https://www.samsung.com/us/business/xr/galaxy-xr/galaxy-xr/
Author : thelastgallon
Score : 141 points
Date : 2025-10-22 16:50 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| This looks to be somewhere between a Quest 3 and Apple Vision
| Pro, with a price point to match. Is that correct?
| ZiiS wrote:
| It is aiming to be much closer to the Vision Pro. Whist it is
| nearly half the price, it is probably still twice the price
| where that would make much difference. The market that _needs_
| this is tiny/nonexistent; if you are happy to drop $1,800 to
| try a device that needs a lot more product and software work
| :shrug: the should be some second hand Vision Pros very close
| to this. (Obviously, other Apple/Android deciders not
| withstanding).
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > It is aiming to be much closer to the Vision Pro
|
| Its going to need some really good optics for that.
| ZiiS wrote:
| It is starting with significantly higher resolution
| displays, harder to know about the rest of the path till we
| see more reviews.
| TGower wrote:
| Higher resolution displays than the Apple Vision Pro at half
| the price, though the compute of XR2 Gen2+ is probably weaker
| xnx wrote:
| > between a Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro
|
| The display, weight, fit, and openness seem better than the
| Apple Vision Pro. The Apple Vision Pro is still the best choice
| if you want a screen that shows your eyes on the outside some
| of the time.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| So, it's been a few years, but does Samsung still have... issues
| with devices exploding? I would not want to live out Sword Art
| Online IRL.
| jsheard wrote:
| They've been fine on the battery front for a while, the
| explodey Galaxy Note was a decade ago. They're understandably
| quite conservative about charging speeds and adopting new
| battery technologies now.
|
| Edit: or maybe not, see the sibling comment about their smart
| ring. At least that looks like an isolated incident.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Beautiful, I may someday in the future try Android XR, for
| the meantime the Quest 3S is fine for my needs.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> exploding_
|
| expanding? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45423490
| jama211 wrote:
| You just take it off, so similar danger really to keeping a
| phone in your pocket against your skin, which I assume you have
| no problems doing
| nerdix wrote:
| For anyone actually concerned about this: the Galaxy XR uses an
| external battery pack with a long power cable just like the
| Vision Pro. The battery is not attached to the headset itself.
| rs186 wrote:
| Anyone watched last evening's live event?
|
| The use cases they showed are just as stupid as those shown in
| Apple's event over two years ago.
| dangus wrote:
| Oof, a little late to this bandwagon. Basically every player in
| this industry is dealing with weak/declining sales.
| jama211 wrote:
| They're not stupid. They know this won't sell many items, they
| don't expect it to. This is what you'd call a "market signal"
| product. It markets them as an innovative company, with their
| fingers in a little bit of every pie, and reminds everyone that
| they exist and make cool things. It's valuable both for your
| company image and for your internal experimental development to
| do this sort of thing now and again.
| dangus wrote:
| It would be a market signal product if this was 2017.
| hu3 wrote:
| > Galaxy XR is available starting today for $1799 or $149/month.
| It includes:
|
| > 12 months of Google AI Pro, YouTube Premium, and Google Play
| Pass.
|
| Not a bad deal for those who pay for those services.
|
| What does Apple bundles with their Vision Pro for $3500?
| jama211 wrote:
| I don't think either sound like a good deal to be honest
| qingcharles wrote:
| I thought the same. They're throwing in a ton of extras to try
| to sweeten the deal. Those ones you listed are probably $50/mo
| in total. Plus it says something about a bunch of sports
| subscriptions too, which are probably very pricey.
|
| (also they want you hooked on those services so they can rebill
| you after 12 months)
| jayd16 wrote:
| I guess that's what, ~$600? But the odds of using all that on
| the same account and caring about the savings seems pretty
| niche.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > What does Apple bundles with their Vision Pro for $3500?
|
| Support for over 5 years, unlike google who'll kill this in
| around half that long?
| parasubvert wrote:
| 3 months of Apple One I believe? (iCloud+, Apple TV, Apple
| Music, Arcade, Fitness+ and News+)
| hapticmonkey wrote:
| > What does Apple bundles with their Vision Pro for $3500?
|
| That the device you strap to your face isn't tracking your
| personal data.
| ageitgey wrote:
| This is going to be sick to buy for almost nothing in like a year
| when it inevitably gets discontinued.
| ZeroCool2u wrote:
| The workspace feature seems like the biggest differentiator
| between this and the Apple Vision Pro. Full multi window display,
| with what seems to be desktop app functionality? That's almost
| tempting.
| malnourish wrote:
| I realize this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, but how can anyone
| justify buying this when Google notoriously kills off projects?
| My money says this goes the way of the Pixel tablet.
|
| If Apple couldn't make it work, does Google really think they
| can? This should be headlining an event, not relegated to a blog
| post.
| nba456_ wrote:
| this was an event https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITXJquX9FqM
| malnourish wrote:
| Thank you, I stand corrected on there being an event.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| Comments are disabled. Were there any utter flubs like meta's
| AI cooking demo?
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| This is really just a hacker news/inside tech meme. Look at
| half the comments on this submission, they're just low effort
| "lol Google kills off products" statements. Random people on
| the street would have no idea what you're talking about,
| because they use chrome, android, Google search, discover,
| Gmail, and Google maps.
|
| I think Google just has a habit of making products that excite
| techies but then prove unsustainable for a wider audience
| (reader being the prime example). I think them trying that (and
| then failing) is better for everyone than them simply not even
| trying, which is what some other major tech players do(Apple)
|
| If people actually want to use this product and it is selling
| well and there are a lot of android XR users, then it's
| unlikely that Google will kill it. If it doesn't sell well and
| there aren't many android XR users, sure, it may be killed, but
| I don't think you'll find many examples of companies sustaining
| an unprofitable line of business just for the goodwill of the
| few people using the product.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| This isn't a reputation only "techies" have picked up on. The
| Pixel phone upgrade gram, Chromecast, and Stadia are all
| things I've seen very normal people lament disappearing.
| Youtube and Search constantly changing for the worse are also
| well-worn and the subject of memes.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| For consumer hardware spaces (tablets and smartwatches)
| they're currently acting like they care, but they have
| previously checked out of those spaces and then come back
| years later saying "Just kidding actually we are doing
| tablets!"
|
| What might save this one is that the Oculus Quest ecosystem
| being Android based with similar hardware, so it should be
| pretty easy for an ecosystem of appropriately designed
| software to get ported over.
|
| Kind of like how big screen Android devices have been an
| afterthought for most apps (hope you like enlarged phone UIs)
| but what might rescue tablets this time is foldable phones
| showing up and making developers consider "what if the screen
| isn't a tall rectangle?"
|
| I still think there's high chances they have one or two
| generations of hardware trying to copy the Oculus Quest /
| Vision Pro and then pull the plug and say "forget VR we're
| doing AI glasses." They were ahead of the curve with Google
| Glass, but have that habit of bailing on things and giving up
| the first mover advantage.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| AR is going to be on the back burner unless miniaturization
| improves for the price point. The only player in that space
| I'm aware of is Anduril's EagleEye, which is Son of
| HoloLens 2 for the Army's IVAS contract. AFAIK Anduril
| yoinked all the staff and tech from the HoloLens team (or a
| lot of the staff anyway) when it fell over.
|
| MS and Magic Leap tried to make holographic AR work, but
| the state of the art wasn't cheap and compact enough for
| them to make any money on it.
| sorenjan wrote:
| Another example would be Android Wear. They lost interest in
| that for years and let it languish, and only recently started
| caring again with the help of Samsung. But an old watch I
| bought never got an update, in fact it lost functionality
| compared to when I bought it, and I won't fall in that trap
| again. I also switched to Spotify when Google shut down their
| Play music, I'll much rather get my music from someone where
| that is their business model and not a hobby.
| anonymars wrote:
| "Am I spending $1800 on a product that will be useful for one
| year, five years, or ten years" is a relevant question, and
| often past performance _is_ indicative of future results
|
| To their credit, they did seem to make things right for
| Stadia.
|
| Meanwhile, if we look at Microsoft and Windows MR, they
| themselves did not, though one of their employees apparently
| built a SteamVR driver on his own
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45110883). Microsoft
| should be embarrassed that they couldn't be bothered to do
| that themselves.
| brookst wrote:
| Are random people on the street really a better approximation
| of the market for a $1800 XR headset than HN users would be?
| p_l wrote:
| Reader got so much flak because it was not just niche techie
| thing, but also had a big footprint among... journalists.
|
| So you had extra backlash because the people who most felt it
| were also people way more vocal
| georgeecollins wrote:
| The problem is that Google actively and seriously works to
| excite developers. Developers develop, Google abandons, and
| the effort made by the developer is wasted.
|
| That's why I don't like Google abandoning projects so much.
| Sure everybody does this sometimes, but no one does it as
| much as Google. It's not because I am a "techie". It's
| because it has been bad for my business. I don't care what
| people off the street think.
|
| This is not a meme.
| ls-a wrote:
| People are still buying the second version of Pebble watch.
| It's called wasting money.
| jama211 wrote:
| Your comment is unhelpful, uncalled for, and unrelated.
| asadm wrote:
| what? the Pebble is essentially very refreshing offering. I
| am tired of "too-smart" Apple watch and am eagerly waiting
| for my Pebble!
| ls-a wrote:
| It's a dead product that was resurrected to cash out again
| from money wasters before it gets killed again
| asadm wrote:
| my original Pebble still works. Not sure what you mean by
| dead.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Everything in this universe is waste of resources. _The true
| value of anything is nothing, nothing has a true value_ [1].
| Physical substances are mere representations of causalities.
|
| 1: gasp this makes so much more sense read as English, I
| guess it really was written in an Indo-European language
| jayd16 wrote:
| Only buy the product for what it is, and not what it might be.
| Assuming they don't go out of their way to brick it post
| shutdown, you should still have an ok device.
| ares623 wrote:
| Stadia owners in shambles
| zeagle wrote:
| I'm last to defend Google usually but not a great example.
| My inlaws got a refund for the hardware and new games they
| purchased/played and got to keep the controller. Everything
| else they've killed? Sure. I wish most collapsed ecosystems
| did this.
| bsimpson wrote:
| You basically got to play Cyberpunk for free and keep one
| of the most ergonomic controllers ever afterwards.
| rockostrich wrote:
| Not at all considering they fully refunded all purchases. I
| got 4 free bluetooth controllers out of it.
| overfeed wrote:
| ... don't forget the free 4k Chromecast(s)
| hbn wrote:
| > My money says this goes the way of the Pixel tablet.
|
| I need to do a Google search every time to recall their history
| with tablets. I remember the Nexus tablets which came out for
| like a 3 year streak.
|
| Then it was the Pixel C in 2015, then a 3 year gap until the
| Pixel Slate, then 5 years before the Pixel Tablet. Do not ask
| me about any of their capabilities or their intention in the
| market because every release could have been anything.
|
| I'm so beyond getting on board with anything Google puts out,
| it's kinda just funny to watch and laugh at this point.
| bsimpson wrote:
| I think the Pixel C was rumored to be a Chromebook that got
| Android instead last minute, and then the Pixel Slate did run
| Android, and now there are all the rumors about ChromeOS
| being rebased atop Android...
| skiman10 wrote:
| The Pixel Slate actually did run ChromeOS and then could
| run Android apps in a VM haha.
|
| And those aren't rumors, there is a pretty big effort to
| get Android ready for ChromeOS and get feature parity.
| Which to me is really unfortunate, CrOS has such a nice
| linux base.
| bsimpson wrote:
| True, but I can see the argument for it. Kinda wild to
| maintain two different userspaces for Linux, when one is
| far and away the most popular for smaller-than-computer
| devices.
|
| Plus, it gives Android developers a widescreen
| demographic to target, which might finally give them a
| nudge to make their UIs adapt to things that aren't
| portrait candybars.
| mdwrigh2 wrote:
| Yeah, that's exactly what happened with the Pixel C. A lot
| of politics around who would own tablets and laptops at the
| time that meant the winds changed direction ~yearly, hence
| the horribly confusing product line ups that happened.
| baby wrote:
| Meta is making it work
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Meta has reasonably priced headsets, with controllers that
| work well for gaming, and a large library of reasonably
| compelling games (admittedly basically all indie games).
|
| It looks like Google has a very expensive headset, no
| controllers, and thus no real games to go along with it.
| spogbiper wrote:
| controllers are an optional first party accessory as shown
| in the demonstration. i'd expect it to work with 3rd party
| controllers as well. whether Meta games will port I'm not
| sure but since both are android based it shouldn't be too
| difficult?
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| at $249, the headset plus controllers put it over $2000,
| which is a lot to spend on an unknown product that might
| be deprecated on arrival. The Meta Quest 3S includes
| controllers and is currently on sale for $249, and at
| least you mostly know what you're going to get, even if
| they never release another VR headset.
| hadlock wrote:
| I think everyone who has ever owned a game console and
| bought the "optional first party accessory" (super scope
| 6, kinect, etc) is painfully aware that since developers
| can't count on widespread adoption, they almost never
| waste resources implementing support for them.
|
| Not that it matters, apple has dropped support for true
| VR and now that google doesn't have to compete on this
| obscure battlefield, it will be cancelled before the end
| of Q4. I honestly feel bad for the team it was probably a
| good product. The launch event may have only been done
| for tax purposes to recover R&D losses.
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| Did Apple try to get into this market? Their device is fairly
| ridiculous compared to where VR seems to have been going all
| these years: cheap nearly disposable headsets like the Oculus.
| Which I believe is half the price of the original HTC Vive.
|
| More expensive than the Vive isn't the way forward. Apple had a
| tech demo and slumping quarterly reports and need some PR wins,
| so out came the headset. I don't think it was a good faith
| effort to get into this market. I think it was to get
| headlines, jazz up stocks, and get attention as an innovator
| outside of laptops and phones.
|
| I have no idea what Google can do here, but Android is a long
| running project. The Pixel line has long-ish term support.
| Google can eat Oculus's lunch. I just think the question is if
| Oculus's walled garden is now too high to climb, both in
| software and patents. FB money and Carmack's talents are going
| to be hard to beat here.
|
| If I had to guess, I'd say Google saw Oculus get good at games,
| but everything else about it is fairly uninteresting. XR/AR
| could be hot and those new Meta glasses are pretty much Google
| Glass on steroids. So who knows, but seeing Google dive back
| into AR/XR is promising and I think they can compete here in a
| way they can't with VR games.
|
| I could see myself buying AR glasses branded Pixel or Google.
| I'd think they'd be a better product than Meta. I don't know
| where Google is going with this and this product seems
| underwhelming, but we may have an entirely different product in
| a year or two. I have a feeling both Apple and Samsung's
| product are PR placeholders until they can catch up to Meta on
| shoe-horning this into Ray-Ban-esque glasses format.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| And Samsung is even worse: remember GearVR ?
|
| I had a Note device that on launch was compatible with GearVR,
| but they killed support for it in one of the few the Android
| updates. This was back when getting 3 Android updates was
| "lucky". i.e. they launched and completely killed GearVR
| (paperweight level) all within 5 years.
| SunlitCat wrote:
| Especially Samsung.
|
| I'm still very salty about Samsung never officially releasing
| their Samsung Odyssey VR headset in Europe. It was the best
| VR headset among the Windows Mixed Reality headsets at the
| time of their release.
|
| Of course, the HP Reverb was better, but it came out much
| later, too late for WMR to really take off.
|
| I still believe that if Microsoft had forced Samsung to
| release the Odyssey VR headset worldwide, WMR could have been
| a success.
|
| And I'm pretty sure Samsung won't release this one (the
| Galaxy VR) worldwide either, which will be the reason it
| fails and Google will probably take that as an excuse to shut
| down the project as well.
| gs17 wrote:
| > I still believe that if Microsoft had forced Samsung to
| release the Odyssey VR headset worldwide, WMR could have
| been a success.
|
| I'm not sure if Microsoft actually wanted to _try_ to make
| it a success. They made a lot of decisions that didn 't
| help it succeed, with one of those decisions leading to
| every headset being a brick (officially, although Oasis
| fixes them) now. I could go on and on about it, because I
| love my Odyssey+ and it's frustrating to see how they
| screwed the ecosystem up so badly.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Its obvious this was greenlit in response to Apple Vision Pro,
| which means is about 1 year away from being killed as soon as
| Apple pulls back on Vision Pro in favor of some sort of AR
| smart glass technology
| p1necone wrote:
| Hopefully you can bypass the builtin software and use it as a
| PC vr headset, otherwise it's just going to be ewaste.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Remember Tango.
|
| Yeah, this is going nowhere, is the typical case having to do
| something because the neighbour is also doing it.
| riedel wrote:
| 1.8k$ that is roughly 10x the amount I paid for my XReal Air 2.
| Does watching movies. Does work as a display using Android
| desktop mode and the phone as an air mouse [0] (worked best for
| me).
|
| Wonder what I get for the other 1.6k, that makes me want it...
|
| [0]
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.htl.agmous...
| rtkwe wrote:
| The XReals are just screens so no tracking and lower resolution
| at 1080 vs 4k. They're completely different products.
| riedel wrote:
| It is clear to me that it is different tech. However, I am
| not referring to the tech, but rather those applications they
| promoting. IMHO, there needs to be a better case for those
| features. I acknowledge that people want 4k in other places,
| so I guess it is partially only me. But particularly for the
| real AR I somehow doubt that resolution is the problem.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Resolution is extremely important for VR and trying to
| display screens and text. The best screen you can possibly
| reproduce is the same resolution as the screens in the eyes
| and takes up the whole FOV so for anything further back
| than that the headset can only approximate what the screen
| would look like (down to the point of diminishing returns
| where the pixels are smaller than your eye can resolve).
| __m wrote:
| Double the resolution, integrated cpu and gpu, +3 DoF
| xnx wrote:
| > Double the resolution
|
| and 4x the pixels
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| The xreal are great and imo do 90% of what I want to do with AR
|
| The software ecosystem and wireless are the things lacking
| BoorishBears wrote:
| This is roughly 100x better of a screen so that pricing tracks.
|
| (I have Xreals and they're a fun toy, but AVP and this are what
| the average person thinks of when they think of a virtual
| screen, not the peephole xreals offer.
| soco wrote:
| But what AR can you do with them? I mean, what AR content can
| you get nowadays? Labeling the stuff around you? Pedestrian or
| bike navigation (not full screen display but hints)? Tourist
| information? Any of this integrates with a sibling app for
| extra info on the connected phone? I'm asking all this because
| for games I think VR is much better, and trying to understand
| the current practical value of customer AR.
| jama211 wrote:
| I saw someone painting on a real window with a digital image
| projected onto it with their Apple Vision Pro kinda like a
| stencil. There are similar use cases like that.
| riedel wrote:
| Xreal is rather VR (it is nice to see what is around you
| still). However, where are the actual AR apps that make
| sense? Also who runs around with a Vision Pro. Then there is
| the camera issue. If things have not changed, you will not be
| welcomed in Europe wearing a camera rig (just read Steve
| Mann's accounts on that).
| servercobra wrote:
| Having used XReals and Vision Pro (which I assume will be very
| similar), they're not even in the same ballpark for experience
| for movies and for desktop. XReals feel like a crappy monitor
| strapped to your face that bounces with your pulse, tilts, etc
| and not enough resolution to be good for coding. Vision Pro
| feels like you're in both the virtual world and real world
| (plus the ultra wide Mac Virtual Desktop is amazing). I tried
| to dev on XReal and quickly gave up. Vision Pro I've been using
| consistently for over a year. Is it worth it? That's personal
| preference, but I think so.
| hiq wrote:
| When do you use it? When you're on the go, like on a plane?
| Or even at home, or in an office? Mostly for coding? Can you
| use it all day long?
|
| I don't think the tech is good enough for me personally but
| I'm hoping we get there in a few years.
| nullishdomain wrote:
| I'm not who you were responding to, but I use it on the
| plane, at home, mostly for coding but also for
| entertainment as well. I probably average about 6 to 8
| hours a day in the headset. I've used a variety of headsets
| in the past, starting way back with the DK2 for Oculus, and
| the AVP is the first I felt was truly capable of replacing
| my monitors.
| hiq wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. Why at home? Is it simply your main
| setup, so you got rid of external displays thanks to it?
| I'd have thought that in a situation where you can easily
| use regular displays, these were still preferable.
|
| I'm surprised that you find it comfortable enough for 6+
| hours, especially since you probably need to keep it
| plugged in. I thought the consensus was that for most
| users it was hard to keep them on even for just a whole
| movie.
| sirjaz wrote:
| Microsoft dropped the Hololens and it was in this price range
| with a much better product. So I have a feeling this will be a
| google glass type item
| jama211 wrote:
| I personally used a HoloLens, it was absolutely not a better
| product. Interesting for the time, but wow was the fov small,
| and the uses limited.
| turblety wrote:
| I think this is really cool, and the more competition and devices
| in this space the better. But absolutely no way I will spend that
| much money for a Google product, that they'll probably kill off
| in less than a year.
| gundmc wrote:
| It's a Samsung product though
| jsheard wrote:
| Yeah but it's built around the Android XR platform, a Google
| product. If Google kills XR then the hardware won't be much
| use.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| That doesn't make it a Google product.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I wonder if Samsung has secured promises of commitment.
| IIRC they required Google to commit to improving Android's
| support for tablets before committing to devices like the Z
| Fold.
| Groxx wrote:
| I'm not really seeing how re-emphasizing Google's
| involvement implies a reduced chance of abandonment.
| Google's kinda famous for that.
| turblety wrote:
| Yeah, fair point, although it's this Android XR thing I don't
| trust will live a year.
|
| Even if it did, to me Samsung + Google is just a no go:
|
| Samsung: Bloated with apps I don't want, can't uninstall but
| probably won't be killed off.
|
| Google: Lean, not too much bloat, but can't trust it to exist
| more than a year.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Google loves to make impactful changes for street creds,
| hardware manufacturers prefer not to support unsold products.
| The end result is the same.
| Jepacor wrote:
| Samsung has already partnered with Microsoft in the past to
| make WMR headsets, and that did not prevent Windows 11 from
| dropping support for the device. The very same could happen
| to a Android-based headset.
| SunlitCat wrote:
| And additionally, Samsung never released their Odyssey VR
| (or it's successor) worldwide, which in my opinion was the
| reason WMR failed as it was the best of the WMR headsets at
| the time of their release (of course the HP Reverb was
| better, but it came out much later).
| baggachipz wrote:
| Exactly my first thought. "One year of support at best". It's
| sad that it's become a meme. I remember when they were the Good
| Guys...sigh.
| spwa4 wrote:
| "Apps from top streaming services like Crunchyroll, HBO Max,
| Peacock, and more"
|
| Is there a fight between Google and Netflix?
|
| Also USD 1800 per headset ... wow.
| ncruces wrote:
| Netflix is a launch partner.
|
| https://threads.com/@techwitheugene/post/DQGFd5jiopP
| drunx wrote:
| I feel like this tech always misses real life usecases. I mean
| yes sure we do watch movies... But are you really going to sit in
| the headset for 2 hours straight. It's physically...
| Biologically(?) Uncomfortable.
|
| Then when they say - explore Google Maps - ok. Fun. But for what?
| 10 minutes? How prominent is that need/activity in our life?
|
| All usecases that Apple and now Google/Samsung showcase are
| "imaginary", wishful thinking usecases. They don't stick. They
| are more like "party-tricks" than something that can integrate
| into our lives and fill in a certain gap.
| polyomino wrote:
| The only thing people really do for extended periods of time in
| these headsets is play gorilla tag, highly skewed towards young
| kids.
| koolala wrote:
| That or VRChat.
| dmarcos wrote:
| I've been in XR for a decade and there's a big gap between
| people that make the headsets and those that use them. The
| actual use cases are too niche for the big companies to care
| long term so they have to invent narratives that don't
| manifest. IMO, Valve focusing a headset in the best possible
| gaming experience is the only one well positioned for an honest
| play in the space.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| The use-case is porn.
| hapticmonkey wrote:
| It's quite obvious that these devices are a prototype for some
| eventual immersive AR glasses. Sure, they are currently bulky
| and heavy and have poor battery life and block your face. But
| these companies hope to eventually iterate all of that away.
|
| This is the groundwork. But I don't know if they have a larger
| vision (pun intended) other than "oh shit, the smartphone
| industry has been conquered and now sees diminishing returns,
| we need something else to generate revenue".
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| Samsung's product pages for the Galaxy XR itself:
|
| * https://www.samsung.com/us/xr/galaxy-xr/galaxy-xr/
|
| * https://www.samsung.com/us/business/xr/galaxy-xr/galaxy-xr/
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! we'll add those links to the toptext as well.
| sfortis wrote:
| I'm wondering why companies are still trying to sell VR headsets.
| History clearly speaks: bulky head-mounted devices have all
| epically failed.
| ares623 wrote:
| The investors yearn for VR
| dotnet00 wrote:
| There's enough of a market for them to exist these days. The
| issue is that companies want to treat VR headsets as if they're
| in the same category as phones or even tablets, when really,
| they're closer to the same category as, say, racing rigs or
| other highly hobby-specific products.
| andybak wrote:
| Exactly this. You can build and ship headsets and make a
| profit if you're not also running a moonshot R&D division off
| the same balance sheet.
| andybak wrote:
| "Failed" for some imagined mass market use case but doing very
| well in lots of healthy niches.
| yahoozoo wrote:
| No thanks. Where are the XR eye contacts?
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| I wonder if there will be a Pixel branded headset next year?
| carpdiem wrote:
| It's interesting that there are essentially no pictures of the
| actual device anywhere on this page (except for a lone image,
| from the back of a user's head, where all you can see is the
| strap and the edge of the front).
| jayd16 wrote:
| When you click through its front and center but I also found it
| odd.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Aha, I see now that they're trying hard to hide the battery
| pack wire. Almost all the shorts are showing the right side
| of the device to hide the custom battery jack.
| blensor wrote:
| I think the most defining factor of it is that you have the play
| store right there and can just run any normal android app too.
|
| I even installed Termux via F-Droid today, and have a bluetooth
| keyboard with touchpad connected to it.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Sadly the whole open ecosystem is in grave doubt moving forward
| since Google announced they are shutting down side loading :-(
| blensor wrote:
| That's something I am worrying about too
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| The Vision Pro has the equivalent of this as well. 20% of the
| apps I run in it are "flatland" to use the snow crash term.
| prophesi wrote:
| This makes me miss Google Cardboard and Daydream.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Daydream
| andybak wrote:
| Cardboard still exists. Daydream was shelved. I might boot up
| my Lenovo Mirage to see if it still has any functionality that
| works. (I bought and never finished Virtual Virtual Reality
| which is actually well regarded)
| gs17 wrote:
| I miss Cardboard too. That little magnet "button" was one of
| the most creative ways to create an input method I've ever
| seen.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The average lifetime of a Pixel is 5 years of support. Will this
| be discontinued by Android 18 or 19? How long will it actually be
| usable before its e-waste? The letters X-R in Galaxy XR do not
| stand for Xtended suppoRt.
| binarynate wrote:
| Although developers may be hesitant to embrace this out of fear
| of Google eventually killing it off, an upshot is that if you
| develop an XR app with Unity (and its XR Interaction Toolkit
| library), it ends up being quite portable across different XR
| devices / operating systems (e.g. Meta Quest, Pico VR, HTC Vive).
| bsimpson wrote:
| I wonder what the preferred ecosystem for VR will end up being.
|
| Seems like there are now ~4 places to buy content (Oculus, Steam,
| Google Play, Apple App Store).
|
| If you buy on Steam, your catalog is reasonably portable over
| time - you can buy another vendor's headset and still access your
| catalog. The cost is that you have to bring a separate device
| with you to host the catalog (unless/until the rumored Steam
| Frame comes out).
|
| Oculus and Play are both based on Android. I suspect there will
| be e.g. guides on Reddit to sideload one vendor's catalog onto
| the other vendor's device.
|
| I can imagine a world where someone prefers to buy content in one
| of these stores, to have everything in one place for portability
| to future devices. You're already seeing this in computer gaming
| with Steam (and Epic, Xbox, etc.).
| jayd16 wrote:
| They're really not that interchangeable. They're targeting
| different hardware with different performance ratings and
| control schemes.
|
| Sure you can probably stream PC VR from steam to most of these
| but it's not the same as on device.
| andybak wrote:
| > but it's not the same as on device.
|
| It mostly is if your local wifi doesn't suck. I honestly
| can't tell the difference in most cases.
| bsimpson wrote:
| I'm curious to see how true that is.
|
| Will the Walkabout Mini Golf deployed to Play be meaningfully
| different than the one from Oculus, or will they include
| controller support for both ecosystems and ship a single APK
| to any storefront that will take it?
| gmueckl wrote:
| I believe that it comes down to whether Unity allows merging
| Horizon OS and Android XR support into a single Android
| build. Right now, you can only have exactly one VR plug-in
| active on a Unity build target IIRC.
| Spunkie wrote:
| I feel like Steam is the only legitimate option of the 4, the
| rest are walled gardens.
|
| I would have been very excited about this Galaxy XR development
| a year ago but today I don't care to even scroll down the page.
| Google's recent Android bullshit(walled garden, killing roms)
| makes this a non-starter.
|
| In fact I wonder if Android/Galaxy XR is secretly responsible
| for these horrible changes to stock android. No chance of a
| XR/real life adblocker ever becoming a thing if you can't
| install your own software and/or the largest advertiser in the
| world needs to OK it's existence.
| Macha wrote:
| I think we have PC gaming and mobile gaming as too relatively
| independent markets with only occasional overlap, and that's
| probably the way VR's going to go. Someone is going to win
| the mobile VR market (probably Meta given their significant
| head start and lead, unless the Occulus lineup gets
| sacrificed at the altar of AI), and the Steam VR ecosystem is
| going to continue to be a thing.
|
| I actually think the Steam VR ecosystem is the most durable
| looking of the ecosystems at the moment with its few medium
| size players. The other 3 all have the risk that their parent
| companies could get bored and do something else, and I mean
| it's made some money, but not the amount of money that is
| guaranteed to keep any of them interested.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Feels like a Steam Market for Android/iOS is an
| inevitability.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The Meta Quest 3 has inside-out tracking and no cables so it
| has a lot of appeal for experiences where you walk around the
| room, particularly fitness games. I can view complex virtual
| worlds from my PC with the link cable and it is is practical
| to carefully move around the living room if I move the
| furniture but then I have to play in the living room.
| cryzinger wrote:
| There's also PlayStation VR.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Has anyone kicked the tires on the software stack? How is the dev
| experience for building an AR/Passthrough app?
| andybak wrote:
| The promise is "it's just OpenXR on Android" but I wasn't
| granted access to a dev kit so I have no idea.
| dijit wrote:
| They've been _extremely_ tight with access to the ecosystem
| thus far, I think because they were building for the release of
| this product.
|
| So, you won't get any real answers unfortunately.
| Reubend wrote:
| I really wish they pushed for a 120 hz refresh rate instead of
| 90. IMO, this makes a huge difference for the immersion. I'm
| guessing that they didn't want to have stutters if their chip
| can't handle the higher FPS, but the refreshed Vision Pro will
| have a significant advantage there.
| cma wrote:
| For 60hz video content at least I recommend AI interpolating to
| 180hz, you can usually only do an integer multiple if not doing
| pure motion vector interpolation, and then dropping or merging
| every other frame to bring it to 90hz. Now that youtube is
| doing 3d conversion they should also add this in, playing back
| 60hz video at 72hz or 90hz is very juddery. Also hopefully the
| youtube app or browser with fullscreened video will switch to
| 90hz when playing 30hz content, but to save battery life they
| may not.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Sadly the weakest part of it is the old Qualcomm chip in it. It
| can just manage to render the 4k displays but it's barely
| capable of it even at 72 hz.
| Razengan wrote:
| Ah Samsung, the "We have Apple at home", I was wondering when
| we'd see their copycat entry for XR.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Kind of sad to see here on "hacker news" that 80% of the comments
| are low effort cheap shots.
|
| The interesting thing here is the core of it, being Android XR
| and its deep AI integration, especially the spatial awareness.
| Devices will come and go, but the OS will be the core that stays
| and grows and evolves over time. I am very curious to know how
| much of this is all exposed as OS foundations to build on vs a
| monolithic app built to look like an OS by Google. This has been
| a large part of Meta's mistake, where the OS is not providing
| many of these fundamentals and any app you see doing it is mostly
| re-inventing it themselves or relying on 3rd party tools like
| Unity to do the heavy lifting.
|
| The really impressive part of Vision Pro is actually how well
| thought out the OS is underneath it, exposing fundamentals of how
| 3D computing can work. Especially the part to do with compositing
| together multiple spatial apps living together in the same shared
| space and even interacting with each other (eg: one app can emit
| a lighting effect that will shade the other's rendering).
|
| I am very curious if Google has done this kind of foundational
| work. Especially if that is designed (as they claim) from the
| ground up to interface with AI models - eg: a 3D vision language
| model can reason across everything in your shared space including
| your pass through reality and respond to it. This would be truly
| amazing but there's zero technical information I can see at this
| point to know if Google really built these foundations or not
| here.
| jayd16 wrote:
| > one app can emit a lighting effect that will shade the
| other's rendering
|
| I always felt this was such an outrageous burden to developers.
| Its cute and all but really, who cares? I don't need one
| desktop window to emit light on another window. Is that really
| worth having to remake or modify every asset?
|
| That said, all the work they did around laundering click and
| gaze information for privacy was nice to see.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| > I always felt this was such an outrageous burden to
| developers
|
| but the point is that it's not a burden? You get it for free.
| Unless you mean having accommodate in your app the fact that
| someone else's might be "shading" it or similar.
|
| I think it's amazing: you can have a real world light source
| coloring a virtual object which is then a reflective light
| source that bounces off to affect rendering of a second app.
| And you don't have to do any of it, the OS is rendering all
| of this. It's fully analogous to say, your OS supporting
| transparency on a 2d window frame such that if I'm looking at
| one window I can see the one behind it. But in 3d and
| incorporating real world pass through it is so much more
| complex.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| If it makes fake things feel real to the user, it's worth it.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > Devices will come and go, but the OS will be the core that
| stays and grows and evolves over time.
|
| Say that to my Google Cardboard SDK programs, or the Google VR
| SDK ones, or Google Daydream ones.
|
| You couldn't have chosen a worse topic on which to dump a
| generic "ranting about Google abandoning projects is low effort
| cheap shot", because Google does abandon VR projects (including
| OSes and APIs, not just devices) every 5 years, almost like
| clockwork. What I would call "a cheap shot" is to think that
| this new fancy "OS" will be any different. In fact, I pity the
| people who still consider jumping on this particular bus
| _again_.
| jamesbelchamber wrote:
| Why on earth _did_ they abandon cardboard? It was really good
| for getting VR in the hands of.. well, everybody - and it
| worked quite well, too (for a bit of cardboard).
|
| If they stuck to what they built originally they would be
| dominating this segment right now.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| People tried Cardboard once and stopped using it.
| asimovfan wrote:
| Cardboard was great, and except a lack of software there
| were no problems about it in my opinion. I remember
| playing flight simulator on google earth and thinking how
| much potential this had. I have a meta quest 2 now and it
| is still not clear to me whether it is really that much
| better than cardboard.
| ben_w wrote:
| I think the lack of software that really took advantage
| of the possibilities and cared about the limitations --
| that wasn't simply a normal smartphone app with a bad UX
| because the display was now on your face -- is the main
| reason Cardboard disappeared.
|
| It's like: imagine if you just run the original DOOM in
| DOSBox on a phone and try to play it with the on-screen
| keyboard -- that will obviously suck. Less obviously,
| even something as simple as going from a NES controller
| to an XBox controller can radically change experiences.
| You have to really consider what the right way is to use
| a system, and instead of doing that a lot of companies
| clearly go for existing zeitgeist in design language.
| (From memory as I heard it well before GenAI, real UX
| experts react to such UI designs in much the same way
| that artists react to Stable Diffusion).
|
| Same goes for most VR stuff: There's some good games, but
| selling it as that means headsets have to be priced as
| consoles. That excludes the Android XR, and absolutely
| excludes the Apple Vision Pro.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Cardboard was what got me interested in the whole area so
| it had it's value. But I think for about 90% of people it
| had negative value because it presented such a poor
| experience to the general user. To this day I ask people if
| they'd like to try my VR headset and they will say "no I
| tried that already, I know what it's like". Most of the
| time they mean cardboard and it bears almost no resemblance
| to the modern day experience. But 10 years later the
| impression still sticks.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I got my wife of all people to try a demo app on the MQ3
| where cracks appear in your walls and your room gets
| invaded by aliens and you have to shoot them with the bop
| gun. She liked it.
|
| But no way am I going to get her to sit through a cat
| simulator or _Asgard 's Wrath 2_. She didn't like _Beat
| Saber_ at all.
| jsheard wrote:
| There's VR and then there's VR, Cardboard was limited to
| 3DoF tracking with a single button for input, which is not
| even remotely comparable to what we think of as VR today.
| Full 6DoF for head _and_ hands has been table stakes for a
| long time, that 's what you need to make something like
| Beat Saber or HL:Alyx work.
| ncruces wrote:
| Which basically means they worked on it, failed, and kept
| trying. Glasses too.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| It's possible for sure that Google will abandon this and I
| absolutely recommend anybody considering buying in do so only
| on the value they can see and realise immediately, not on any
| future promise.
|
| But none of that takes away from the intellectually
| interesting part of this : what is new here, what
| possibilities does it open up? What implications does it
| have?
|
| The main reason it's less likely this gets abandoned is
| because the spotlight in the the AI race is quickly moving to
| how much contextual information you can pour in about the
| user's ambient environment so that AI can actually do or say
| something useful for the user. That pretty much means
| glasses, and glasses mean you need a spatial computing OS to
| drive the underpinnings that the whole thing can operate on.
| Right now the technology for true AR glasses is still 2+
| years out so the temporary placeholder for all that
| functionality is these larger headsets. But line of sight to
| all the pieces falling into place is there, so all the
| players are effectively in a long game where they are
| building up their ecosystems to be ready for the main game
| when it does arrive.
| ajdude wrote:
| > Kind of sad to see here on "hacker news" that 80% of the
| comments are low effort cheap shots
|
| It's moreso that Google has used up all of its Goodwill a long
| time ago for that 80%, especially in the vr field.
|
| The only people that will put investment into this are the 20%
| who don't remember every other time they've done the same
| thing.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| If the Apple Vision Pro/Galaxy XR were viable than the MQ3
| would be viable too, that is, the MQ3 does most of what the
| those do and it does more because it has game controllers and
| has decent applications and games, particularly fitness games.
| I don't think most people will pay a lot for "high definition"
| so getting people to pay almost 10x as much for something
| that's maybe 2x better is a hard sell.
|
| I bought an MQ3 because I was curious about AVP and thought,
| "Hey I could get a six month head start on understanding XR
| application development" and came to enjoy the platform.
|
| My complaint about the MQ3 as a software developer is that it
| has just 8 GB of RAM. With an AAA budget you can fit an AAA
| game into it, but it is a challenge to "share an experience
| with another VR user" based on photographic content and glTF
| models and whether you use _Horizon Worlds_ or your own web
| site using
|
| https://aframe.io/
|
| and WebVR. It is straightforward to view that kind of content
| on a PCVR browser but to get it to work reliably on the Quest
| you have to be systematic about resource sizes.
|
| The software innovation is real but it builds on the past. The
| MQ3 is basically an Android tablet you wear on your face. AVP
| is a Macbook Pro you wear on your face, etc. If you can use
| Unity Framework to make flat games you can use Unity Framework
| to make XR games.
|
| In the 1990s I was a VRML enthusiast and got laughed at by all
| sorts of people who would say "So you're going to wheel down
| the aisles of the shopping center and put things in your cart?"
| Today we know that you can use a 2-d app store with VR
| controllers and it's great, it's _great_ to use any web
| application which meets the WCAG AAA standard. You can just
| sideload phone and tablet applications into the MQ3 even
| system-y things like Tailscale and it frequently "just works".
|
| I think Apple has thought through the "run 2d apps in a 3d
| space" a bit better than Meta did but the late rollout of
| controllers let MQ3 keep the lead in immersive apps. One of the
| titles that is packed in with the Galaxy XR is _NFL PRO ERA_
| which sent tingles up my spine on the MQ3 when I walked into a
| frickin ' NFL stadium under the lights as the frickin'
| quarterback -- it was amazing.
|
| That kind of hardware can deliver that kind of experience and
| Apple will have to catch up. Panographic photographic
| experiences can also be amazing in VR and Samsung is promising
| to deliver from Google and that's another selling point, but
| many MQ3 and AVP viewers now are watching and sharing
| panographic video on Youtube now.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| One thing I don't see mentioned either in the blog or in the
| comments here is the camera/sensor system. It's such a necessary
| part of the magic, for these things to work! It's such a combined
| effort of sensors, processing power, and software!
|
| Reminder that Vision Pro has a dedicated R1 chip, with a
| blistering 256GB/s memory (with the actual cpu "only" having
| 153GB/s)! That's as much as the quad-channel memory LPDDR5x Strix
| Halo!
|
| It'll be interesting to see how Samsung & then others fair at
| this, and over time to see how much Google, Qualcomm or other
| platform providers help versus leave device makers to fend for
| themselves at sensor fusion and other _ultra_ realtime tasks
| here. Whether the Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 here _can_ do enough, and
| whether the software can make decent use of that hardware is so
| TBD for this new ecosystem. It 's not super super clear who is
| leading the charge to make it all slick and smooth. My default
| assumption is Qualcomm likely holds a big chunk of the stack, and
| sole-proprietorship of the stack like that seems like a real
| threat to long-term viability of XR as a technology: like the
| Valve Steam Deck so strongly exhibited, it's only through intense
| cross-stack ownership and close collaboration (in the Linux
| kernel in this case) that we see genuinely good products emerge.
|
| Sensors, from Samsung's specs page: Two High-
| resolution Pass-through cameras Six World-facing tracking
| cameras Four Eye-tracking Cameras Five Inertial
| Measurement Units(IMUs) [commentary: whoaaa, thats a lot]
| One Depth sensor One Flicker sensor
|
| As an aside, this sort of makes me want a device that just does
| eye tracking. That there are _four_ eye tracking cameras here
| seems wild! I 've mostly seem some pretty chill examples of
| webcam based tracking; it'd be neat to see what kind of user
| interface we could build if we really could see where people are
| looking.
|
| Also maybe worth reviewing what Android ARCore offers, as this
| defines so much of what we get here. I'd love to see more depth-
| based capture systems about in general: not just on the XR
| displays but on regular devices too! To build a better library of
| depth-having media. Apple's had LiDAR since iPhone 12 Pro (2020)!
| There's some ToF on Android phones but close to zero lidar. We
| also see tons of big fancy dual-sensor XR cameras out there, but
| AFAIK nothing for phones! Just adding a second stereoscoping
| camera on the back of phones would be so obvious, & do so much to
| help the XR world! It feels like XR products are being left to
| stand all on their own with no help from the rest of the mobile
| device ecosystem, and it feels so obvious & unworkable.
| DecentShoes wrote:
| I'm not falling for that again. Google will abandon and "sunset"
| Android XR in 2027 and this device will be bricked.
| cubefox wrote:
| Technical specifications here:
| https://news.samsung.com/global/introducing-galaxy-xr-openin...
|
| It seems the battery is external, like in the Apple Vision Pro,
| but it's not clear. The display (OLED) resolution is also the
| same.
| internet2000 wrote:
| It's interesting that Samsung's launching this, even though the
| Vision Pro hasn't been setting any sales records. I'd love to be
| a fly on the wall in the chasing-Apple department at Samsung...
| surely they'd have the business process to stop projects when the
| Apple target isn't successful.
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