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.

> 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_.

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.

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.