Samsung and Google aim to surpass Apple with AI-powered headsets

It’s been more than 17 years since the launch of the iPhone ushered in the modern smartphone era, and ever since then, tech companies have been obsessed with disrupting it.

The most common approach is mixed reality XR headsets. It’s a computerized goggle that displays all your apps and other digital content right in front of your face.

Samsung is the latest company to venture into this category with the Galaxy XR. Samsung will start selling it Tuesday night for $1,800. appleVision Pro.

Early adopters will also receive a series of digital benefits, including free access to paid versions. googleI’ve had Gemini AI Assistant and YouTube Premium for a year.

The headset is manufactured in partnership with Google for software; Qualcommwhich brings this chip to the Galaxy XR.

Samsung’s Galaxy XR lets you experience an immersive virtual computing experience where apps and other content appear to float in your field of vision. An external camera projects the real world onto a small 4K display inside the headset, so you can walk around the room without bumping into anything while wearing your Galaxy XR.

Control everything with hand gestures, voice, or a combination of both.

As for the headset itself, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re looking at an Apple Vision Pro.

From the curved glass on the Galaxy XR’s front, to the metal trim, to the external battery pack that hangs from the headset by a cable, it’s as if Samsung and Google spent the past two years reverse-engineering the Vision Pro.

Over the past two years, we’ve learned a lot about these computers.

These are niche, expensive products that most people don’t want to use, and they don’t yet have killer apps or enough immersive content to keep you entertained and worth spending $2,000 or more on.

As soon as ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, the hopes of the metaverse disappeared and the tech industry shifted its focus to artificial intelligence. Mark Zuckerberg also changed his company name tometaIn 2022, there will be little talk about the Metaverse.

But Samsung is pitching the Galaxy XR differently.

It may come with all the shortcomings of Apple and Meta’s headsets, but Samsung and Google say the Galaxy XR is a real stepping stone to the AI ​​glasses currently in development with eyewear brands. warby hoodie And Gentle Monster.

These devices rely on Google’s AI assistant Gemini, which is also central to the Galaxy XR experience.

Google showed an early demo of these glasses at its annual I/O event in May, but details about when such devices will be available are unclear. Google also has a long history of announcing products at I/O that never actually go on sale to the public.

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However, Google and Samsung are acting as if things are different this time, which is why Gemini is such an important part of the Galaxy XR.

You can control everything in the headset using hand gestures, and Samsung has copied the same gestures that Apple devised for the Vision Pro.

But Gemini’s controls were the most impressive part of Samsung’s Galaxy XR demo in New York last week.

With Gemini, you can organize floating windows of apps in your virtual workspace, ask it questions about landmarks you’re looking at in Google Maps, and tell it to generate funny videos using Veo, Google’s AI video generator similar to OpenAI’s Sora.

Overall, Gemini’s demo was perfect. Even in a noisy conference room, he understood everything I said and quickly executed my commands.

It wasn’t necessarily revolutionary, but it was a step beyond what Vision Pro had, which had no generative AI capabilities.

Like Meta’s Ray-Ban AI glasses, we see how Gemini evolves to fit more comfortable and stylish form factors. And now you can understand why Apple reportedly changed its plans from developing a new version of Vision Pro in favor of AI glasses scheduled for release in 2026.

Now let’s talk about the big drawbacks.

Gemini runs in the cloud. This means you need to give Gemini permission to “see” everything you do on your headset by sending it over the internet to Google’s servers. Google doesn’t have the same private cloud technology that Apple has for its AI systems, so it risks sharing a lot of personal information about what you do on your devices with the company. It will be elementary for many people.

While we can see the promise of AI-powered glasses, they’re an even more niche product than immersive headsets and much smaller than smartphones, laptops, and tablets.

Meta, the market leader in this category, sold just 2 million pairs of Ray-Ban glasses in its first two years. In comparison, Apple sells well over 200 million iPhones a year. We still have a long way to go before glasses become a must-have accessory for mobile phones like wireless earphones and smartwatches.

And as impressive as Gemini is so far, a future where smartphones are replaced by eyeglass-like AI devices has never seemed more distant.