This looks to be somewhere between a Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro, with a price point to match. Is that correct?
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Edit: or maybe not, see the sibling comment about their smart ring. At least that looks like an isolated incident.
> 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?
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.
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...
The software ecosystem and wireless are the things lacking
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.
(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.
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.
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.
* https://www.samsung.com/us/xr/galaxy-xr/galaxy-xr/
* https://www.samsung.com/us/business/xr/galaxy-xr/galaxy-xr/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(also they want you hooked on those services so they can rebill you after 12 months)
It looks like Google has a very expensive headset, no controllers, and thus no real games to go along with it.
I don't think the tech is good enough for me personally but I'm hoping we get there in a few years.
I even installed Termux via F-Droid today, and have a bluetooth keyboard with touchpad connected to it.
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.
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.).
Sure you can probably stream PC VR from steam to most of these but it's not the same as on device.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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_.
If they stuck to what they built originally they would be dominating this segment right now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
That the device you strap to your face isn't tracking your personal data.
1: gasp this makes so much more sense read as English, I guess it really was written in an Indo-European language
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".
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.
So we're assuming that it won't get killed in 5 years because it's nicely tied to the current bubble ?
The reason these people haven't tried anything else since Cardboard is because VR is still clumsy, expensive, of limited use and/or vomit inducing. I say that as my headset is still in active use after 5 years of owning it. In many respects I think nothing better than Cardboard has yet came out at this point for the ultra casual user.
Otherwise people were willing to give the Vision Pro a try because it was launched with much fanfare with a huge press focus, and I'd expect the Meta glasses to also have interest from people getting to try it.
These kind of big mainstream targeted events need to happen more often and stick in the news for people's perception of XR to move on.
Does anyone have any recommendations on the matter ? would be super helpful as we have a flight coming soon (2 months) and I can already see her anxiety levels rising.
- A - if we get crazy low client/server latency between the headset and a remote server with the game running. Basically Google Stadia but 100x more reliable while higher bandwidth.
- B - Steam comes to VR headsets as a native store running locally on the MQ or Vision Pro for instance.
- B' - we get a competitive headset with an open source OS, or a VR Steam Deck where Steam provides local native apps.
I'm not holding my breath on any of these options. But still hope.
Perhaps XR should suck Google and Samsung's money as the next walled garden, to get smacked down by some internation court as uncompetitive and forced to open up to third party stores and apps. But that would also take around a decade ?
If you have existing assets its really not trivial at all to port them and get them looking right. Not impossible but not trivial.
Games targeting the system won't be stuck in Apple Tv/Vision Pro conundrum of having no clear target hardware or have to ask the user to go buy a controller from another platform they might have never heard of before.
https://www.androidcentral.com/gaming/virtual-reality/sony-n...
TBF sitting still in a dark room fixating in the same direction for 2 hours straight is also uncomfortable. Either the movie captures your attention and you bear with it, or you take breaks.
Keeping an headset on for hours is fine if you fit it properly (get used to it), and for the movie use case in particular you don't need to be sitting, which can make it way more comfortable that the traditional experience.
Now it's clearly for people who lust for something they don't have right now. If you're 100% happy with doing everything on your phone for instance, it won't be for you. Same way you wouldn't even care for a laptop or desktop computer I guess.
PiMax and others at least know their lane. Simulation. These phone makers and social media companies aren’t vested in it other than to sell you ads to your eyeballs.
I'm not interested in the OS or "AI" at all. What I really want to know is if I can connect this to a regular PC/handheld via USB-C and use the headset as a primary/secondary display, and if so, is it good enough for gaming? The biggest issue with all these handheld gaming devices flooding the market is that the screen is tiny and most PC games aren't optimised for such a screen - but having a headset with a virtual big screen display like this could solve that problem. Unfortunately Samsung don't make this clear at all on the linked page.
This is the killer app, but where do you see that capability?
I think it’s pretty foolish for a large company who hopes to own computing to not invest in this areas.
Meta Ray-Bans are a successful product that has a clear understanding of use case and effectively delivers a normal product with appealing aesthetics. Google glass could have led to that much earlier but the product looked like headgear for braces and the product concept was abandoned prematurely.
Galaxy XR is a late response to Vision Pro which itself is a late response to Meta Quest/Steam VR devices. The HTC Vive and Valve Index were the market signals, but that market signal has already proven to be something of a false one by the time Apple and Google got around to playing in the space.
There is really no market for general purpose computing VR devices. You are either gaming (niche), watching movies alone (niche again, rich but lonely Vision Pro users), or you’re taking POV pictures/video and doing light voice assistant/AI type tasks (Meta Ray-Bans, which are broadly appealing and even function as regular glasses for basically the same price as regular glasses).
Unsurprisingly, the only true hit with growing sales out of the use cases is the Meta Ray-Bans.
Let’s not forget that even the best headsets like Vision Pro are useless for a large chunk of people who get motion sick from them.
The successful product concept is the Meta Ray-Bans, and it’s crazy to me that they have zero competition especially from Apple who is all over customizable fashion wearables with the Apple Watch. The Vision Pro and Galaxy XR should have been cancelled.
But I still remember the uproar in various communities about Samsung’s decision not to release what was, at the time, the only premium-tier WMR headset, with higher resolution and refresh rate, a wider FOV, mechanical IPD adjustment, and a few other features.
Only the HP Reverb WMR headset, released about two years later, offered comparable premium features and launched in more regions. But in my opinion, by then it was already too late.
The thing is, even at a slightly higher price point, the Samsung Odyssey would have been a great entry into PC VR for many people, since it was still one of the most affordable headsets compared to its competitors at the time, like the HTC Vive or the Oculus Rift.
That alone could have helped WMR gain more traction. But many reviewers weren’t too impressed by the other WMR headsets from different manufacturers. Some even compared them to the Samsung Odyssey and suggested waiting for Samsung to release theirs worldwide, since it was clearly the better one (at that time, in 2017).
https://www.reddit.com/r/GearVR/
Honestly, it was a phenomenal product and is part of the reason I'm considering the Galaxy XR now.