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Galaxy XR: The first Android XR headset
Related: https://www.samsung.com/us/xr/galaxy-xr/galaxy-xr/ https://www.samsung.com/us/xr/galaxy-xr/galaxy-xr/, https://www.samsung.com/us/business/xr/galaxy-xr/galaxy-xr/ https://www.samsung.com/us/business/xr/galaxy-xr/galaxy-xr/
- zoklet-enjoyer 1y agoThis looks to be somewhere between a Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro, with a price point to match. Is that correct?
- ZiiS 1y agoIt is aiming to be much closer to the Vision Pro. Whist it is nearly half the price, it is probably still twice the price where that would make much difference. The market that _needs_ this is tiny/nonexistent; if you are happy to drop $1,800 to try a device that needs a lot more product and software work :shrug: the should be some second hand Vision Pros very close to this. (Obviously, other Apple/Android deciders not withstanding).
- TGower 1y agoHigher resolution displays than the Apple Vision Pro at half the price, though the compute of XR2 Gen2+ is probably weaker
- wkat4242 1y agoHigher vertical resolution but lower horizontal. It's about the same.
- xnx 1y ago> between a Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro 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.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoSo, 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.
- jsheard 1y agoThey've been fine on the battery front for a while, the explodey Galaxy Note was a decade ago. They're understandably quite conservative about charging speeds and adopting new battery technologies now. Edit: or maybe not, see the sibling comment about their smart ring. At least that looks like an isolated incident.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoBeautiful, I may someday in the future try Android XR, for the meantime the Quest 3S is fine for my needs.
- walterbell 1y ago> exploding expanding? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45423490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45423490
- jama211 1y agoYou just take it off, so similar danger really to keeping a phone in your pocket against your skin, which I assume you have no problems doing
- nerdix 1y agoFor anyone actually concerned about this: the Galaxy XR uses an external battery pack with a long power cable just like the Vision Pro. The battery is not attached to the headset itself.
- dangus 1y agoOof, a little late to this bandwagon. Basically every player in this industry is dealing with weak/declining sales.
- jama211 1y agoThey’re not stupid. They know this won’t sell many items, they don’t expect it to. This is what you’d call a “market signal” product. It markets them as an innovative company, with their fingers in a little bit of every pie, and reminds everyone that they exist and make cool things. It’s valuable both for your company image and for your internal experimental development to do this sort of thing now and again.
- dangus 1y agoIt would be a market signal product if this was 2017.
- hu3 1y ago2012 Google Glasses were already a market signal. (ouch, to think Apple is a decade late here). Galaxy XR are again a signal. Also serves to keep VR people employed.
- dangus 1y agoThis just means that Samsung/Google and Apple both profoundly misunderstand the market. 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.
- rs186 1y agoAnyone 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.
- ceo_tim_crook 1y ago[dead]
- hu3 1y ago> 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?
- jama211 1y agoI don’t think either sound like a good deal to be honest
- qingcharles 1y agoI thought the same. They're throwing in a ton of extras to try to sweeten the deal. Those ones you listed are probably $50/mo in total. Plus it says something about a bunch of sports subscriptions too, which are probably very pricey. (also they want you hooked on those services so they can rebill you after 12 months)
- jayd16 1y agoI guess that's what, ~$600? But the odds of using all that on the same account and caring about the savings seems pretty niche.
- hu3 1y agoit also wins in weight a display resolution over Vision Pro. for those who care
- dmitrygr 1y ago> What does Apple bundles with their Vision Pro for $3500? Support for over 5 years, unlike google who'll kill this in around half that long?
- parasubvert 1y ago3 months of Apple One I believe? (iCloud+, Apple TV, Apple Music, Arcade, Fitness+ and News+)
- hapticmonkey 1y ago
- ageitgey 1y agoThis is going to be sick to buy for almost nothing in like a year when it inevitably gets discontinued.
- ZeroCool2u 1y agoThe 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.
- malnourish 1y agoI 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.
- nba456_ 1y agothis was an event https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITXJquX9FqM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITXJquX9FqM
- malnourish 1y agoThank you, I stand corrected on there being an event.
- hnuser123456 1y agoComments are disabled. Were there any utter flubs like meta's AI cooking demo?
- IncreasePosts 1y agoThis is really just a hacker news/inside tech meme. Look at half the comments on this submission, they're just low effort "lol Google kills off products" statements. Random people on the street would have no idea what you're talking about, because they use chrome, android, Google search, discover, Gmail, and Google maps. 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.
- riedel 1y ago1.8k$ 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.agmouse&hl=en-US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.htl.agmous...
- rtkwe 1y agoThe XReals are just screens so no tracking and lower resolution at 1080 vs 4k. They're completely different products.
- riedel 1y agoIt is clear to me that it is different tech. However, I am not referring to the tech, but rather those applications they promoting. IMHO, there needs to be a better case for those features. I acknowledge that people want 4k in other places, so I guess it is partially only me. But particularly for the real AR I somehow doubt that resolution is the problem.
- rtkwe 1y agoResolution is extremely important for VR and trying to display screens and text. The best screen you can possibly reproduce is the same resolution as the screens in the eyes and takes up the whole FOV so for anything further back than that the headset can only approximate what the screen would look like (down to the point of diminishing returns where the pixels are smaller than your eye can resolve).
- wkat4242 1y agoThe Xreal One does do tracking. 3DoF by default and 6DoF with the optional camera.
- rtkwe 1y ago$750 and it's one RGB only camera not IR so it doesn't work great from the reviews I'm seeing with supposedly anchored screens drifting pretty badly in normal indoor lighting.
- sirjaz 1y agoMicrosoft 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
- jama211 1y agoI personally used a HoloLens, it was absolutely not a better product. Interesting for the time, but wow was the fov small, and the uses limited.
- _carbyau_ 1y agoI did like the association of using it for lego/ikea/manufacturer instructions for putting things together though. I haven't seen that use case marketed much.
- turblety 1y agoI 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.
- gundmc 1y agoIt's a Samsung product though
- jsheard 1y agoYeah but it's built around the Android XR platform, a Google product. If Google kills XR then the hardware won't be much use.
- throwaway314155 1y agoThat doesn't make it a Google product.
- dotnet00 1y agoI wonder if Samsung has secured promises of commitment. IIRC they required Google to commit to improving Android's support for tablets before committing to devices like the Z Fold.
- Groxx 1y agoI'm not really seeing how re-emphasizing Google's involvement implies a reduced chance of abandonment. Google's kinda famous for that.
- turblety 1y agoYeah, fair point, although it's this Android XR thing I don't trust will live a year. 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.
- 1y ago
- spwa4 1y ago"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.
- ncruces 1y agoNetflix is a launch partner. https://threads.com/@techwitheugene/post/DQGFd5jiopP https://threads.com/@techwitheugene/post/DQGFd5jiopP
- drunx 1y agoI 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.
- polyomino 1y agoThe only thing people really do for extended periods of time in these headsets is play gorilla tag, highly skewed towards young kids.
- koolala 1y agoThat or VRChat.
- makeitdouble 1y agoExercise works well enough too. If shadow boxing in a stinky gym for 2h is grating to you, doing it in VR will have a better chance of success in the long run.
- dmarcos 1y agoI’ve been in XR for a decade and there’s a big gap between people that make the headsets and those that use them. The actual use cases are too niche for the big companies to care long term so they have to invent narratives that don’t manifest. IMO, Valve focusing a headset in the best possible gaming experience is the only one well positioned for an honest play in the space.
- kridsdale1 1y agoThe use-case is porn.
- drunx 1y ago
- neuronexmachina 1y agoSamsung's product pages for the Galaxy XR itself: * https://www.samsung.com/us/xr/galaxy-xr/galaxy-xr/ https://www.samsung.com/us/xr/galaxy-xr/galaxy-xr/ * https://www.samsung.com/us/business/xr/galaxy-xr/galaxy-xr/ https://www.samsung.com/us/business/xr/galaxy-xr/galaxy-xr/
- dang 1y agoThanks! we'll add those links to the toptext as well.
- sfortis 1y agoI'm wondering why companies are still trying to sell VR headsets. History clearly speaks: bulky head-mounted devices have all epically failed.
- ares623 1y agoThe investors yearn for VR
- dotnet00 1y agoThere's enough of a market for them to exist these days. The issue is that companies want to treat VR headsets as if they're in the same category as phones or even tablets, when really, they're closer to the same category as, say, racing rigs or other highly hobby-specific products.
- andybak 1y agoExactly this. You can build and ship headsets and make a profit if you're not also running a moonshot R&D division off the same balance sheet.
- andybak 1y ago"Failed" for some imagined mass market use case but doing very well in lots of healthy niches.
- groundzeros2015 1y agoMaybe the technology is not quite there but it’s hard not to see AR/VR occupying a central role in computing in the future. I think it’s pretty foolish for a large company who hopes to own computing to not invest in this areas.
- yahoozoo 1y agoNo thanks. Where are the XR eye contacts?
- andrewinardeer 1y agoI wonder if there will be a Pixel branded headset next year?
- carpdiem 1y agoIt'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).
- blensor 1y agoI 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.
- zmmmmm 1y agoSadly the whole open ecosystem is in grave doubt moving forward since Google announced they are shutting down side loading :-(
- blensor 1y agoThat's something I am worrying about too
- kridsdale1 1y agoThe Vision Pro has the equivalent of this as well. 20% of the apps I run in it are “flatland” to use the snow crash term.
- blensor 1y agoI can absolutely see that, yes Not everything needs to be XR/VR/AR to be useful.
- prophesi 1y agoThis makes me miss Google Cardboard and Daydream. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Daydream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Daydream
- andybak 1y agoCardboard still exists. Daydream was shelved. I might boot up my Lenovo Mirage to see if it still has any functionality that works. (I bought and never finished Virtual Virtual Reality which is actually well regarded)
- gs17 1y agoI miss Cardboard too. That little magnet "button" was one of the most creative ways to create an input method I've ever seen.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoThe 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.
- binarynate 1y agoAlthough 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).
- bsimpson 1y agoI 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.).
- jayd16 1y agoThey'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.
- andybak 1y ago> 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.
- bsimpson 1y agoI'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?
- gmueckl 1y agoI 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.
- 1y ago
- jayd16 1y agoHas anyone kicked the tires on the software stack? How is the dev experience for building an AR/Passthrough app?
- andybak 1y agoThe promise is "it's just OpenXR on Android" but I wasn't granted access to a dev kit so I have no idea.
- dijit 1y agoThey've been extremely tight with access to the ecosystem thus far, I think because they were building for the release of this product. So, you won't get any real answers unfortunately.
- Reubend 1y agoI 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.
- cma 1y agoFor 60hz video content at least I recommend AI interpolating to 180hz, you can usually only do an integer multiple if not doing pure motion vector interpolation, and then dropping or merging every other frame to bring it to 90hz. Now that youtube is doing 3d conversion they should also add this in, playing back 60hz video at 72hz or 90hz is very juddery. Also hopefully the youtube app or browser with fullscreened video will switch to 90hz when playing 30hz content, but to save battery life they may not.
- zmmmmm 1y agoSadly the weakest part of it is the old Qualcomm chip in it. It can just manage to render the 4k displays but it's barely capable of it even at 72 hz.
- Reubend 1y agoAh, that's interesting. Are there any benchmarks of the Qualcomm chip versus the Vision Pro?
- zmmmmm 1y agoI think it's typically said to be about half as powerful as the M2 was. So far far less than the M5. I'm honestly quite surprised at what they seem to be able to get out of it on the Galaxy XR. I guess the direct partnership with Qualcomm probably means it's optimised like crazy. But even still, just rendering at 4K at all is impressive for that chip.
- magixx 1y agoIt's interesting because this is exactly right in that this chipset can't handle these high resolutions that well. The Play For Dream VR headset team went into this a bit and they're using similar hardware.
- Razengan 1y agoAh Samsung, the "We have Apple at home", I was wondering when we'd see their copycat entry for XR.
- zmmmmm 1y agoKind 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.
- jayd16 1y ago> one app can emit a lighting effect that will shade the other's rendering 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.
- zmmmmm 1y ago> I always felt this was such an outrageous burden to developers 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.
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoOne 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.
- DecentShoes 1y agoI'm not falling for that again. Google will abandon and "sunset" Android XR in 2027 and this device will be bricked.
- cubefox 1y agoTechnical specifications here: https://news.samsung.com/global/introducing-galaxy-xr-opening-new-worlds 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.
- internet2000 1y agoIt'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.
- upcoming-sesame 1y agoWhile 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.
- makeitdouble 1y agoThe 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.
- Mr_Eri_Atlov 1y agoHalf the price, lighter, and a more open eco system? These are definitely all positives, but I'm still waiting to see the Steam Frame.