Galaxy XR: The first Android XR headset

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.

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.