The first Samsung Android XR headset, and first Android XR headset of them all, has been detailed in a YouTube video.
World-famous YouTuber Marques Brownlee was the first to give the headset its initial public outing in a recent YouTube video. And if there’s serious new competition for the Meta Quest 3 among mainstream buyers in 2025, it’s this.
At this stage it may be more interesting to assess what the likely manicured demo situation shows about the aims and direction of the platform. But Brownlee does have some useful observations about the Samsung VR headset itself, even if he was not able to reveal many solid technical specs.
Samsung claims the headset will be released this year, although as yet there are no price deals.
Samsung XR Vs Quest 3 And Apple Vision Pro
Brownlee says the image quality of the headset’s screen and its field of view are “fine” but “not remarkable.” And he says the sharpness of the image is at least one step down from that of the Apple Vision Pro.
This suggests that, sensibly, Samsung and Google are not aiming for the kind of money-no-object buyer the Vision Pro has relied upon. Apple’s $3500 headset has sold poorly, leading to sales targets being dropped to half their original level, while November reports indicated Apple may quietly discontinue the device entirely.
Despite that, the hands-on demo still shows clear similarities with the Apple Vision Pro.
First, there’s how it looks. The Samsung Android XR headset does not have the Vision Pro’s strange fake face display but it does have a shiny visor section and a generally more upmarket appearance than the Meta Quest 3.
It has some higher-end features too, including auto-adjust inter-pupillary distance settings and eye tracking.
Android XR features
Brownlee’s demo was also controlled entirely using his hands and eyes. The Samsung headset has inner optics for eye tracking, and the familiar array of cameras that can map out the position of your fingers.
It will be able to install Android apps from Google Play, and there are “spatial” versions of apps made for Android XR, including YouTube and Google Maps.
So far there’s not necessarily a huge benefit over the Meta Quest platform, which allows users to sideload apps. But the Android XR platform will, perhaps unsurprisingly, have major integrations with Google’s Gemini AI system.
It can be used to analyze and recognize objects in the wearer’s view and, perhaps more interesting, navigate the Samsung headset’s interface. Brownlee asks it to rearrange the on-screen windows, for example, in a clear demonstration of AI chatbot-style natural language processing.
It remains to be seen whether Android XR will do enough, or be good enough, to sway the manufacturers currently relying on their own forks of AOSP (Android open source project) for their VR headsets. Pico and Meta headsets both already use the skeleton of Android as their software framework.
If Pico were to switch to Android XR for its future headsets, it would presumably come with significant software licensing costs that would be passed to the end user. $40 per device is the figure that has been floating around for years as the cost to get Google Mobile Services, and the core Google app suite, on a phone.
