We have been waiting for months to know the name, price, and release date of the “Project Moohan” headset. Today, Samsung has announced that the headset is called Galaxy XR, and is available to be purchased in the US and Korea starting from $1799. People buying the headset can also enjoy an Explorer pack with some free perks like 12 months of Gemini AI Pro and 12 months of YouTube Premium.
We already knew most of the info shown. Most of the demos were pretty basic, and most of them (like the Google Maps one) were things we already saw in other presentations by Google. There were no disruptive announcements, no killer app, no killer feature. And it seems that Google was more interested in mentioning AI than XR.
Even the attention of the community was not so high: there were fewer than 100 people registered for the livestream, only 15-20K watching it, and my tweets about it had probably a third of the engagement I had while tweeting from Meta Connect.
Probably everyone knew that with this price and this set of features, this headset had no chance to become mainstream, so everything was tuned down to realistic expectations. Which is something I appreciate: it’s useless to create hype when reality can’t meet expectations. It just creates new “XR is dead” articles. But at the same time, I think something more than this could have been done. Meta Connect was a much bigger and more exciting event, for instance. And I felt more excitement for the Meta Ray-Ban Display than I feel now for this Galaxy XR headset.
Anyway, as I’ve said, it is a first step. I hope the first step of a long journey of Google and Samsung in XR, something that may help XR become mainstream one day.