Samsung's Android XR Headset Ships In 2025, And We Went Hands-On

Samsung's first standalone headset is coming in 2025, running Google's new Android XR operating system and powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chipset.

Currently known as "Project Moohan", the headset will feature "state-of-the-art displays", eye tracking and hand tracking. Beyond this, Samsung isn't yet sharing specifications.

I went hands-on with an early headset developer kit showcasing Google's software and Samsung's hardware. You can pull up a location in Maps and pinch your way in and out of locales, almost exactly as Google Earth VR offered from 2016 on PCs with Steam and the Vive controllers.

From 2025, Google Maps runs with full immersion and hand tracking in a standalone headset from Samsung. Go inside a spot and look around, go out to street view or head back up above to look at the city, and zoom all the way out to Earth scale.

Gemini is Google's agent seeing what you see across virtual and mixed reality. Use it to answer questions and pull up details about your current location, or simply to rearrange your windows. I put my Meta Ray-Bans on a table and circled them with my hand and Gemini correctly identified them as "smart glasses", but the AI also couldn't identify how many people were in the room as I looked around at them.

Google’s 2025 addendum to Daydream is based around OpenXR and includes Photos, TV and Chrome. In addition to the above services, Google also promises automatic Play support for most apps.

I saw a nice combination of familiar interface ideas in Android XR for resizing windows and moving them around, all usable without eye calibration.

Android XR doesn't require eye tracking even though Samsung includes it. Meta HorizonOS works without eye tracking being necessary, and neither Quest 3 nor 3S include eye or face tracking sensors. Meanwhile, eye tracking is a core part of its pinch selection interface in Apple Vision Pro.

The Samsung headset's lens separation adjusted mechanically for my interpupillary distance after a few seconds of keeping my head still. The bright low latency passthrough was nice in both open periphery and a small magnetic light shield that did a nice job sealing off the scene. I preferred the light shield on and noted the hard strap would rule out bed use, where Vision Pro and Quest 3S work well with soft straps.

Perceived field of view ranged considerably based on the specific positioning of the rigid strap on the back of the head, pulling the lenses closer to my eyes depending on tightness of the strap. Samsung and Google declined to give specifications for resolution or field of view, and that might be partially because nothing here seemed final from either party. They wanted my feedback.

I've been won over by soft head straps for VR headsets with worn bags for batteries and accessories taking all possible weight off the head. Ideally, a battery pack connected to my headset should also pass through data and power from almost any connected USB hub. I want power and accessories, even a captured HDMI input, to come into the headset over a single cable through the pack. I also expect my VR headsets to work with precision head and hand tracking in total darkness.

A VR headset like this travels well in a shoulder bag, and it would be great for such a bag to include a couple zippered pockets for controllers, battery packs and cords.

When my VR headset comes out of my bag and goes onto my head, my iPhone should not just mirror its screen, but should be continuously usable by tapping in the open air on a virtual touchscreen even if it goes into my bag. Google and Samsung should make this continuous use happen for Android phones. This is not possible today on visionOS and iOS, but it should be, and Meta is exploring the same functionality with partners in HorizonOS.

Google Services For Glasses & Headsets

Google's range of transparent and shaded glasses demos range from light to very light, with the most impressive being a binocular waveguide featuring roughly two bright lines of text in the center of my vision. Another glasses demo featured a responsive mini map in the center of my vision which rotated as I turned in place exactly like a video game mini map. I immediately wanted to take the glasses out into Manhattan to guide me. I hated a monocular glasses display Google showed.

Translation and navigation concepts shown across this range of glasses make clear Google's ambitions are bigger than headsets.

Android Accessories

A Google representative suggested in an interview that touch typing on any surface would be a solved problem within a year or two. At Meta, Zuckerberg sees wristband interfaces surpassing keyboards just a few years after.

At AWE in 2024, we tried out the AirMouse with its natural interface tying together with eyewear. I'm learning to type one-handed with the TapXR band, while both Apple Watch and AirPods embrace straightforward gestures for answering or dismissing calls. Meta demonstrated simple gestures in its own wristband paired to Orion glasses.

A haptic band and watch paired together could make a powerful combination with eye tracking. Samsung says it has controllers planned for the system alongside its battery.

The pitch for Android XR is that almost anything can become an accessory to Gemini and computer vision, and Google aims to support Unity PolySpatial for multitasking volumetric apps. Microsoft Flight Simulator's map of the world is surpassed, it seems, only by Google Maps, and I was wowed finding my street corner in New York as the individual buildings of my street resolved in three dimensions. I saw a service that continues to belong everywhere, and redefines what it means to understand a place before, during or after visiting it.

I didn't see photorealistic avatars nor games from Google, leaving big holes in the market for differentiated Android-based VR headsets that could be filled by a hypothetical Quest Pro 2. Porting is supposed to be an easy process from HorizonOS to Android XR, but some developers will also remember things like Google Daydream and Stadia before they commit to a project on Google Play that will require years of support.

"It’s fairly straightforward to bring apps and games to Android XR," Virtual Desktop developer Guy Godin wrote to UploadVR. "It supports a majority of the same OpenXR extensions that Quest/Pico support today. Bringing my native OpenXR app over took only a few hours and the basics just worked out of the box. Personally I think it’s refreshing to work with a platform that wants to collaborate with developers rather than one who tries to block and copy us. Grateful to have more options for consumers in the near future and I’m very excited to bring the best PC streaming solution to Android XR."

Avatars & The Long View

Google's services are useful in far more places more than just VR headsets, but the absence of photorealistic avatars in my demo could suggest the Samsung and Google team-up might fall short on this aspect of the technology, just as Meta could be preparing to get its long-brewing Codec Avatar technology into a hypothetical Quest Pro 2, as Apple works to mature its groundbreaking Persona technology.

Meta is at the cusp of carrying a continuous call flowing seamlessly from a Ray-Ban glasses view in WhatsApp to representation as a hyper-realistic avatar in a HorizonOS headset. Even if Google can get 90% of Meta's VR storefront ported over to Android XR, it could still lag Meta and Apple in a fundamental area during a defining year in personal computing's revolution.

Then again, not having super-realistic avatars is also a benefit for some types of online communication. Quest Pro is evidence that face and eye tracking isn't super useful unless it is really good face and eye tracking. The next Meta-backed headset which carries additional face or eye tracking hardware should transfer from research to productization a key missing piece of Mark Zuckerberg's "metaverse" strategy.

I would have liked to test out controllers and games instead of the smart monocle, but there are many opportunities ahead for Samsung, Google and other Android XR partners to demonstrate such things.

The Google Maps experience in Android XR is sublime. I want to see an Android XR headset with a soft strap give me Street View Through Time by changing the year on the street outside a self-driving Waymo car. If Google can get Gemini right, there's real potential in this platform.