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Galaxy XR: The first Android XR headset

(blog.google)
169 points thelastgallon | 4 comments | 22 Oct 25 16:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.212s | source
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bsimpson ◴[22 Oct 25 18:37 UTC] No.45673332[source]▶
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.).

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1. jayd16 ◴[22 Oct 25 19:00 UTC] No.45673626[source]▶
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.

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2. andybak ◴[22 Oct 25 19:14 UTC] No.45673793[source]▶
> 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.

3. bsimpson ◴[22 Oct 25 19:20 UTC] No.45673881[source]▶
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?

4. gmueckl ◴[22 Oct 25 20:55 UTC] No.45675031[source]▶
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.