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Galaxy XR: The first Android XR headset

178 points by thelastgallon

by zmmmmm

7 subcomments

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.

by bsimpson

3 subcomments

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.).

by Reubend

3 subcomments

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.

by neuronexmachina

1 subcomments

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/

by hu3

6 subcomments

> 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?

by blensor

2 subcomments

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.

by drunx

6 subcomments

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.

by riedel

6 subcomments

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...

by ZeroCool2u

0 subcomment

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.

by zoklet-enjoyer

3 subcomments

This looks to be somewhere between a Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro, with a price point to match. Is that correct?

by carpdiem

1 subcomments

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).

by turblety

2 subcomments

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.

by makeitdouble

0 subcomment

The biggest part could be the controllers being first party and marketed as part of the experience from the start.
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.

by internet2000

0 subcomment

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.

by upcoming-sesame

0 subcomment

While on the topic, I'm looking for some AR / VR platform to help with my child (11 yo) severe flight anxiety.
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.

by binarynate

1 subcomments

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).

by DecentShoes

0 subcomment

I'm not falling for that again. Google will abandon and "sunset" Android XR in 2027 and this device will be bricked.

by andrewinardeer

0 subcomment

I wonder if there will be a Pixel branded headset next year?

by jayd16

2 subcomments

Has anyone kicked the tires on the software stack? How is the dev experience for building an AR/Passthrough app?

by rs186

1 subcomments

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.

by sirjaz

1 subcomments

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

by sfortis

4 subcomments

I'm wondering why companies are still trying to sell VR headsets. History clearly speaks: bulky head-mounted devices have all epically failed.

by jauntywundrkind

0 subcomment

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.

by prophesi

2 subcomments

This makes me miss Google Cardboard and Daydream.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Daydream

by cubefox

0 subcomment

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.

by spwa4

1 subcomments

"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.

by dangus

1 subcomments

Oof, a little late to this bandwagon. Basically every player in this industry is dealing with weak/declining sales.

by ageitgey

0 subcomment

This is going to be sick to buy for almost nothing in like a year when it inevitably gets discontinued.

by malnourish

11 subcomments

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.

by yahoozoo

0 subcomment

No thanks. Where are the XR eye contacts?

by Razengan

0 subcomment

Ah Samsung, the "We have Apple at home", I was wondering when we'd see their copycat entry for XR.

by 1970-01-01

0 subcomment

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.

by giancarlostoro

4 subcomments

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.