Samsung Will Lastly Launch Its Rival to the Apple Vision Pro

Samsung is on the brink of enter the prolonged actuality area.

After greater than a 12 months of rumors and teases, the South Korean tech big’s first XR headset, recognized internally as Project Moohan, will hit the market earlier than the top of 2025, Gizmodo reported.

It’s coming at a time when tech fanatics are nonetheless weighing the professionals and cons of Apple’s Vision Pro, a $3,500 headset that’s impressed some and disenchanted others.

Project Moohan, although nonetheless formally unrevealed, is predicted to boast high-end specs from the beginning. It’s slated to run on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chip, a processor designed particularly for digital actuality experiences. It will doubtless function Micro OLED shows, hand- and eye-tracking capabilities, and—just like the Vision Pro—an exterior battery pack for energy.

What actually units Project Moohan aside is its working system: It would be the first headset to run on Android XR, Google’s mixed-reality-specific platform that launched in December. How it compares to Apple’s streamlined and clear UI stays to be seen, as that has been one of many Vision Pro’s greatest strengths.

Still a prototype, the XR headset additionally options full integration of Google Gemini, the household of multimodal AI fashions developed by Google. Once activated, the AI assistant sees what the wearer sees, providing the whole lot from restaurant critiques to immersive, 360-degree Google Earth renderings upon request.

One main unknown stays: the value. With premium elements and supplies onboard, Project Moohan is prone to be fairly costly. Still, if Samsung undercuts the steep price of Apple’s Vision Pro by even a couple of hundred {dollars}, the scales may tip for patrons interested by XR however not able to splash down money for the Vision Pro’s price ticket.

Apple’s headset has struggled to seek out on a regular basis use wants outdoors productiveness and leisure, with the corporate even slowing down manufacturing of the headset final October as a result of weak demand. Many nonetheless discover the notion of a wearable XR headset too dystopian to take severely.

If Samsung can supply related {hardware} and a extra sensible platform—at a extra accessible worth—it may remodel prolonged actuality from a novel idea for the gear-obsessed to a glimpse at the way forward for expertise.