Samsung’s Galaxy XR is finally here, and with it, a perfect middle-ground of price and features to simultaneously turn up the competitive pressure on both Meta and Apple.
Over many years I had been patiently waiting for Apple to launch its own headset in order to finally give Meta some real competition. Even though the Quest and Vision Pro headsets are so far apart in price, there’s already plenty of examples of Meta adding or improving features on its headset in direct response to Apple’s work.
But there’s only so much competitive pressure that a $3,500 headset can put on a $500 headset like Quest 3. In the end, they aren’t in the same price class (hell, they aren’t even in adjacent price classes), and the potential audience for each headset doesn’t have a huge overlap.
But now we have Galaxy XR which has managed to land right in the middle of Quest and Vision Pro, on price and features. This is a single headset that’s bringing new competition to both of these other headsets.
On the lower end, Quest 3 is primarily a gaming machine.
Thanks to Galaxy XR’s optional controllers (and Android XR’s compatibility with OpenXR and Unity), it has the potential to be just as much of a gaming machine as Quest 3. We’ll have to see if the headset gets enough traction to get a critical mass of VR game ports from the Quest library, but that path is at least much more straightforward for developers than it is to port a Quest game to Vision Pro.
On the much higher end, Vision Pro is a ‘spatial computing’ machine focused on media, browsing, and flatscreen productivity.
Thanks to Android XR’s replication of Vision Pro’s major features, it has the potential to do most of the same tasks—like media playback, browsing, and flatscreen productivity—at a much lower cost.
In a way, Galaxy XR is proving that it can do much of what Vision Pro does at a fraction of the cost, while also supporting the gaming-focused capabilities of Quest. If the finished product is polished enough to actually be worth using, it’s in the perfect position to put real competitive pressure on both Meta and Apple at the same time.
That’s not to say that Quest 3 doesn’t also do many of the things Vision Pro does at an even lower cost. But it’s origin as a ‘gaming console’—and its lack of access to the massive flat app libraries of Google’s Play Store or Apple’ App Store—has left it with some notable deficiencies in the ‘spatial computing’ department.
Competition is always good for consumers as it tends to mean better products at lower prices, which accelerates the pace of innovation.
The consumer XR industry has been firmly in the Quest 3 and Vision Pro era for the last two years or so. Things have been steady, but nothing has moved the needle enough to bring a step-change in the number of users. For that, the industry is going to need to offer smaller, cheaper, and better headsets.
Galaxy XR’s fusion of the gaming capabilities of Quest and the spatial computing capabilities of Vision Pro is just the right thing, at the right time, to accelerate and take XR to its next phase of adoption.
