Galaxy XR is now available today. Here’s what to expect.
Today, Samsung introduced Galaxy XR, the very first device built on Android XR, our new operating system for next-generation headsets and glasses.
Android XR combines Gemini's helpfulness with an awareness of your surroundings to bring you new ways to use an AI assistant and experience apps and games. The Galaxy XR headset offers a first look at this new way of interacting with technology.
Galaxy XR gives you an infinite screen to explore your apps, with Gemini by your side. It lets you switch between being fully immersed in a virtual environment and staying present in the real world, and you can navigate the interface naturally with your voice, hands and eyes.
Since it’s Android, you can fill its infinite screen with your favorite apps from Google Play. You can access Google apps that have been reimagined for XR, totally new experiences made for Android XR by developers, and millions of mobile and tablet apps, including:
- Apps from top streaming services like Crunchyroll, HBO Max, Peacock, and more
- New versions of Google Maps, Google Photos, YouTube, Google TV, Chrome and Meet.
- Immersive games from studios like Mirrorscape, Owlchemy Labs, and Resolution Games.
- Over 50 new experiences made for XR from Adobe, Calm, Fox Sports, MLB and more
And because Android XR is built on open standards with support for tools like OpenXR, WebXR, and Unity, even more innovative content is on the way.
But what makes this experience truly transformative is that Gemini is built for it. On Galaxy XR, Gemini Live can better understand what you’re seeing and doing, making it easier to get the help you need or take action on your behalf across your apps — with just a conversation.
Here’s three examples of how Galaxy XR opens up new ways to watch, explore and create:
When it’s time to unwind, the Galaxy XR turns any room into your private theater. With YouTube, you can dive into the world’s largest library of immersive 180 and 360-degree VR content, or check out the new spatial tab for content that creators have converted to 3D. You can also kick back and watch movies in Google TV on a massive, resizable screen.
With Google Photos, you can convert your entire existing library of 2D photos and videos into 3D, letting you step into your memories.
As you're watching videos, viewing photos, or playing games, Gemini is ready to help. For example, if you're catching up on basketball highlights, you can just ask about the stats of a player on-screen. Gemini understands what you’re seeing and gets you the info in real time.
Get closer to the action with immersive 180 and 360-degree videos on YouTube.
Turn any room into your private movie theater with Google TV.
Turn your existing 2D photos and videos into 3D memories you can step back into with Google Photos.
With Google Maps on Android XR, you can explore the world in stunning 3D with Immersive View. Walk the streets of Tokyo before you book a trip, soar over the Grand Canyon or even revisit your old neighborhood, all from your living room. And with Gemini, you can simply look at a landmark like the Colosseum while you’re exploring and ask, “What’s the story behind this building?” to get an answer instantly.
You can also use Circle to Search on a virtual object — or a real-world item in your room — to get helpful information from the web about anything you see without breaking your flow.
Explore the world in 3D with Google Maps, and just ask Gemini to learn more about what you're seeing.
Use Circle to Search on digital content to get helpful information from the web without breaking your flow.
Circle to Search works on objects in the real world, too. Just circle anything you see to learn more.
With the Galaxy XR, you can have multiple apps open at any size — your browser, your documents, your music app — and arrange them all around you in a massive, private space. Imagine your Chrome tabs organized in an arc, using Flow in stunning detail, or taking a Google Meet call with video tiles you can expand to read expressions clearly. New apps, like Adobe’s immersive video editing app Project Pulsar and TopHatch's sketching app Concepts, are also available today to help you create. You can even pair a keyboard and mouse or link your PC for a complete desktop experience.
This is where Gemini becomes a true creative partner. You can brainstorm with Gemini about what you’re looking at, and when your space gets too cluttered, just say, "Hey Google, organize these windows," and Gemini will instantly arrange them into a neat layout.
With the Galaxy XR, your workspace is infinite. You can arrange multiple apps around you and switch seamlessly between tasks.
Galaxy XR is available starting today for $1799 or $149/month. You can purchase it on Samsung.com, or in Samsung Experience stores in the US and Korea. You can also sign up for a demo in Samsung’s stores or select Google Stores in New York and California.
For those who want to be the first to try it out, we put together the Explorer Pack(terms apply 1 ). It’s a limited-time all-access pass to what's possible on Galaxy XR. It includes:
- 12 months of Google AI Pro, YouTube Premium, and Google Play Pass.
- A $1 per month trial of YouTube TV for 3 months in the US, or 6 months of TVING Premium in Korea.
- Access to the 2025-2026 season of NBA League Pass in the US, or 12 months of the Coupang Play Sports Pass in Korea.
- And access to Status Pro’s NFL PRO ERA, Project Pulsar from Adobe, Asteroid, and Calm.
We’re just getting started. Stay tuned for even more on the devices and experiences coming from Android XR in the near future.
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Comments
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 AshamedCaptain 2025-10-2221:153 reply > 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_.
It's possible for sure that Google will abandon this and I absolutely recommend anybody considering buying in do so only on the value they can see and realise immediately, not on any future promise.
But none of that takes away from the intellectually interesting part of this : what is new here, what possibilities does it open up? What implications does it have?
The main reason it's less likely this gets abandoned is because the spotlight in the the AI race is quickly moving to how much contextual information you can pour in about the user's ambient environment so that AI can actually do or say something useful for the user. That pretty much means glasses, and glasses mean you need a spatial computing OS to drive the underpinnings that the whole thing can operate on. Right now the technology for true AR glasses is still 2+ years out so the temporary placeholder for all that functionality is these larger headsets. But line of sight to all the pieces falling into place is there, so all the players are effectively in a long game where they are building up their ecosystems to be ready for the main game when it does arrive.
By makeitdouble 2025-10-2223:031 reply > The main reason it's less likely this gets abandoned is because the spotlight in the AI race [...]
So we're assuming that it won't get killed in 5 years because it's nicely tied to the current bubble ?
By mlvljr 2025-10-230:37 [dead]
By jamesbelchamber 2025-10-2221:235 reply 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.
By PaulHoule 2025-10-2222:32 I got my wife of all people to try a demo app on the MQ3 where cracks appear in your walls and your room gets invaded by aliens and you have to shoot them with the bop gun. She liked it.
But no way am I going to get her to sit through a cat simulator or Asgard's Wrath 2. She didn't like Beat Saber at all.
By makeitdouble 2025-10-2223:131 reply I hear you, but I wouldn't put the blame on Cardboard.
The reason these people haven't tried anything else since Cardboard is because VR is still clumsy, expensive, of limited use and/or vomit inducing. I say that as my headset is still in active use after 5 years of owning it. In many respects I think nothing better than Cardboard has yet came out at this point for the ultra casual user.
Otherwise people were willing to give the Vision Pro a try because it was launched with much fanfare with a huge press focus, and I'd expect the Meta glasses to also have interest from people getting to try it.
These kind of big mainstream targeted events need to happen more often and stick in the news for people's perception of XR to move on.
By wkat4242 2025-10-2316:50 The problem is not that there's not good experiences now, it's that the lingering bad aftertaste of the bad tracking and overly rough experiences (eg rollercoaster) causes. Nausea is a powerful influence and can really contaminate an experience and cause a really negative lingering association. This is also why we advise people to stop immediately when they feel it to get their VR legs. If they go too long the barrier to put the headset back on is too great.
But these days VR tracking is pretty great so it only happens to people who are seriously sensitive now. Especially when teleport motion is used.
By jsheard 2025-10-2222:23 There's VR and then there's VR, Cardboard was limited to 3DoF head tracking with a single button for input, which is not even remotely comparable to what we think of as VR today. Full 6DoF for head and hands has been table stakes for a long time, that's what you need to make something like Beat Saber or HL:Alyx work.
By underlipton 2025-10-231:35 Cardboard and Project Tango. They had the Quest - both low-end and high-end - before even Facebook did, let alone Apple, and ceded it for no reason. In fact, they canceled Tango FOR Cardboard, meaning that, instead of the world knowing Google for having the most advanced XR platform, they were known for having the cheapest one (albeit also the most accessible).
By wkat4242 2025-10-2316:45 As a VR enthusiast, cardboard was terrible for adoption.
Every time id demo real VR people would be like "oh yeah those rollercoaster videos that make you sick". Because cardboard was shitty 3DoF tracking that causes nausea, was used only for non-interactive experiences and was generally really low quality. It did more to hurt VR adoption than promote it.
Cardboard was great, and except a lack of software there were no problems about it in my opinion. I remember playing flight simulator on google earth and thinking how much potential this had. I have a meta quest 2 now and it is still not clear to me whether it is really that much better than cardboard.
By ben_w 2025-10-2222:54 I think the lack of software that really took advantage of the possibilities and cared about the limitations — that wasn't simply a normal smartphone app with a bad UX because the display was now on your face — is the main reason Cardboard disappeared.
It's like: imagine if you just run the original DOOM in DOSBox on a phone and try to play it with the on-screen keyboard — that will obviously suck. Less obviously, even something as simple as going from a NES controller to an XBox controller can radically change experiences. You have to really consider what the right way is to use a system, and instead of doing that a lot of companies clearly go for existing zeitgeist in design language. (From memory as I heard it well before GenAI, real UX experts react to such UI designs in much the same way that artists react to Stable Diffusion).
Same goes for most VR stuff: There's some good games, but selling it as that means headsets have to be priced as consoles. That excludes the Android XR, and absolutely excludes the Apple Vision Pro.
By hnbad 2025-10-2318:06 People still use it. VR "adult content" is still a thing.
I admit that that's the only use case in which it seems to have stuck around that I'm aware of.
But if that industry is good enough for OpenAI, maybe there's a there there?
By ncruces 2025-10-2221:39 Which basically means they worked on it, failed, and kept trying. Glasses too.
By ajdude 2025-10-2221:35 > Kind of sad to see here on "hacker news" that 80% of the comments are low effort cheap shots
It's moreso that Google has used up all of its Goodwill a long time ago for that 80%, especially in the vr field.
The only people that will put investment into this are the 20% who don't remember every other time they've done the same thing.
By reactordev 2025-10-230:511 reply Is this the LLM hallucinating or you? Google has a long history of abandoning things. Samsung isn’t doing themselves any favors by pricing this at $1799usd. This is a #metoo product. Nothing more. Where is the killer experience that Apple headset / Samsung headset / Meta headset provides? Being social? Watching a movie? c’mon! They have nothing. Now, if AI gets to the point where you can stream worlds, imagine movies, or paint the universe than maybe we might have something down the road but today - It’s about as useful as the Apple Vision which isn’t very useful.
PiMax and others at least know their lane. Simulation. These phone makers and social media companies aren’t vested in it other than to sell you ads to your eyeballs.
At the risk of getting way too personal for HN, my wife and I couldn’t have sex for a while recently due to medical reasons. For my own sanity, I decided to look at what VR porn was available as I hadn’t checked it out since whenever the Quest 2 was released.
Woof. I think OnlyFans has taken away all of the good looking porn actresses (performers?) away from the large producers. Those large producers are the only ones that can make VR porn - or rather, I’m sure it’s possible for OnlyFans types to but probably not worth it.
Anyways, I’m not so sure about your statement. VR is not the right environment to “enjoy” a 4/10 on a good day.
By reactordev 2025-10-2311:49 They were obviously joking
By PaulHoule 2025-10-2222:29 If the Apple Vision Pro/Galaxy XR were viable than the MQ3 would be viable too, that is, the MQ3 does most of what the those do and it does more because it has game controllers and has decent applications and games, particularly fitness games. I don't think most people will pay a lot for "high definition" so getting people to pay almost 10x as much for something that's maybe 2x better is a hard sell.
I bought an MQ3 because I was curious about AVP and thought, "Hey I could get a six month head start on understanding XR application development" and came to enjoy the platform.
My complaint about the MQ3 as a software developer is that it has just 8 GB of RAM. With an AAA budget you can fit an AAA game into it, but it is a challenge to "share an experience with another VR user" based on photographic content and glTF models and whether you use Horizon Worlds or your own web site using
and WebVR. It is straightforward to view that kind of content on a PCVR browser but to get it to work reliably on the Quest you have to be systematic about resource sizes.
The software innovation is real but it builds on the past. The MQ3 is basically an Android tablet you wear on your face. AVP is a Macbook Pro you wear on your face, etc. If you can use Unity Framework to make flat games you can use Unity Framework to make XR games.
In the 1990s I was a VRML enthusiast and got laughed at by all sorts of people who would say "So you're going to wheel down the aisles of the shopping center and put things in your cart?" Today we know that you can use a 2-d app store with VR controllers and it's great, it's great to use any web application which meets the WCAG AAA standard. You can just sideload phone and tablet applications into the MQ3 even system-y things like Tailscale and it frequently "just works".
I think Apple has thought through the "run 2d apps in a 3d space" a bit better than Meta did but the late rollout of controllers let MQ3 keep the lead in immersive apps. One of the titles that is packed in with the Galaxy XR is NFL PRO ERA which sent tingles up my spine on the MQ3 when I walked into a frickin' NFL stadium under the lights as the frickin' quarterback -- it was amazing.
That kind of hardware can deliver that kind of experience and Apple will have to catch up. Panographic photographic experiences can also be amazing in VR and Samsung is promising to deliver from Google and that's another selling point, but many MQ3 and AVP viewers now are watching and sharing panographic video on Youtube now.
By d3Xt3r 2025-10-230:55 > The interesting thing here is the core of it, being Android XR and its deep AI integration
I'm not interested in the OS or "AI" at all. What I really want to know is if I can connect this to a regular PC/handheld via USB-C and use the headset as a primary/secondary display, and if so, is it good enough for gaming? The biggest issue with all these handheld gaming devices flooding the market is that the screen is tiny and most PC games aren't optimised for such a screen - but having a headset with a virtual big screen display like this could solve that problem. Unfortunately Samsung don't make this clear at all on the linked page.
> 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.
> 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.
By jayd16 2025-10-2223:36 You need to use their shader and lighting model and yeah, you don't have full control of the lighting at that point.
If you have existing assets its really not trivial at all to port them and get them looking right. Not impossible but not trivial.
By kridsdale1 2025-10-2222:41 If it makes fake things feel real to the user, it’s worth it.
By underlipton 2025-10-231:381 reply >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).
This is the killer app, but where do you see that capability?
By underlipton 2025-10-2322:16 Oh, right. That eg is more of an ie, though. Almost nothing Apple or other VisionOS developers have showcased has taken advantage of this capability. Not even, "If I throw one virtual app at another virtual app, they bounce off each other." I've seen some experiments, but nothing in production. Everyone seems to be terrified of making spatial apps that take advantage of the fact that they "live" in a "space" that we can move our bodies through.
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.).
I feel like Steam is the only legitimate option of the 4, the rest are walled gardens.
I would have been very excited about this Galaxy XR development a year ago but today I don't care to even scroll down the page. Google's recent Android bullshit(walled garden, killing roms) makes this a non-starter.
In fact I wonder if Android/Galaxy XR is secretly responsible for these horrible changes to stock android. No chance of a XR/real life adblocker ever becoming a thing if you can't install your own software and/or the largest advertiser in the world needs to OK it's existence.
By Macha 2025-10-2220:28 I think we have PC gaming and mobile gaming as too relatively independent markets with only occasional overlap, and that's probably the way VR's going to go. Someone is going to win the mobile VR market (probably Meta given their significant head start and lead, unless the Occulus lineup gets sacrificed at the altar of AI), and the Steam VR ecosystem is going to continue to be a thing.
I actually think the Steam VR ecosystem is the most durable looking of the ecosystems at the moment with its few medium size players. The other 3 all have the risk that their parent companies could get bored and do something else, and I mean it's made some money, but not the amount of money that is guaranteed to keep any of them interested.
By makeitdouble 2025-10-2223:25 Steam is the only future proof option at this point, yet it can't be the way forward except:
- A - if we get crazy low client/server latency between the headset and a remote server with the game running. Basically Google Stadia but 100x more reliable while higher bandwidth.
- B - Steam comes to VR headsets as a native store running locally on the MQ or Vision Pro for instance.
- B' - we get a competitive headset with an open source OS, or a VR Steam Deck where Steam provides local native apps.
I'm not holding my breath on any of these options. But still hope.
Perhaps XR should suck Google and Samsung's money as the next walled garden, to get smacked down by some internation court as uncompetitive and forced to open up to third party stores and apps. But that would also take around a decade ?
By numpad0 2025-10-2222:17 Feels like a Steam Market for Android/iOS is an inevitability.
By PaulHoule 2025-10-2222:56 The Meta Quest 3 has inside-out tracking and no cables so it has a lot of appeal for experiences where you walk around the room, particularly fitness games. I can view complex virtual worlds from my PC with the link cable and it is is practical to carefully move around the living room if I move the furniture but then I have to play in the living room.
By makeitdouble 2025-10-2223:49 Isn't it a walking dead at this point ?
https://www.androidcentral.com/gaming/virtual-reality/sony-n...
They'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.
By gmueckl 2025-10-2220:55 I 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.
By bsimpson 2025-10-2219:20 I'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?
By andybak 2025-10-2219:14 > 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.
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 cubefox 2025-10-2310:04 They seem to be using 72 rather than 90:
> Refresh rates: 60Hz, 72Hz (Default), 90Hz (Up to, upon service request)
https://news.samsung.com/global/introducing-galaxy-xr-openin...
But it's unclear what "service request" is supposed to mean.
By cma 2025-10-2220:33 For 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.
Sadly 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.
By magixx 2025-10-233:54 It'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.
Ah, that's interesting. Are there any benchmarks of the Qualcomm chip versus the Vision Pro?
By zmmmmm 2025-10-234:24 I 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.
By wkat4242 2025-10-2316:46 For me that makes no difference at all tbh. VR veteran here though.
