I tested Google and Samsung’s Android XR headset and glasses: Gemini AI can see my life now – Video

Android XR, coming in 2025, came along with a Samsung mixed reality headset and glasses later. I’ve tried a ton of demos, and the always-on AI that can see what I’m seeing is amazing and full of unanswered questions.

Google announced Android Xr Samsung has a mixed reality headset for Google and there are also glasses in the works. This is a lot to digest and I just got off the demo of this stuff. Let me talk to you. Google has promised a partnership with Samsung and Qualcomm for a year. Now talking about this future of mixed reality and we already have Apple in the landscape, we already have meta in the landscape and we also have other French actors. Now, Google is back in the landscape. They had been out of VR and AR for the most part and are back on Android. Xr is a new platform and it will work with phones and it will work with other things and it is Gemini powered in that Gemini AI will run in everything to work, not only in mixed reality headsets, but Google says that it will be . be on AI glasses AR glasses and all kinds of other emerging wearables for your face. Now, what I’m going to try because now it’s only for developers is a headset made by Samsung which is a mixed reality headset and also a pair of notification glasses that Google calls Project Astra. These have been in the works for a while and will begin to be field tested soon. Now, bear with me because I will be talking a lot and we don’t have any photos or videos of my demo because they are not allowed. It’s a pretty standard issue for early VR and AR in my experience. So, first of all, the Mohan project, which is the name of the mixed reality headset for now that Samsung is going to release next year, looks a lot like a Vision Pro or looks like uh the meta quest pro. If you remember the headset, it’s a visor type headset that you put on your head. There are lenses here that can block the light if you want Titans behind. It has a nice crisp display, it has hand tracking and eye tracking. That’s not the exciting part. A lot of it feels very familiar. But when I tried the demo on this headset, it displayed two D apps in a very similar interface to Android. I can press familiar Google apps and navigate with my hands and it raises various pains. But I could also turn on Gemini to be my companion throughout the journey. Now, you already have things like Siri working in Apple Vision Pro and there are some voice AI things and uh the meta quest. But this is something that can still see what you’re doing and why this becomes fascinating is that I could actually point to something and say, hey, what is this? Or tell me more about it and move my hand here and Gemini will tell me. And what I found I could do was surf the web. I can ask a question about something or ask where I live. He pulled out a map. And Google has immersive apps for that too. At the time, youtube and Maps were the most notable Apple does not even have a pro vision app immersive maps. Still, the cards allowed me to throw this great immersive 3D environment into my home. But also I could point to things in the landscape and ask about them and Gemini could tell me what those were and that combination became really interesting. I feel like I’m starting to get lost in the apps and navigating around. Gemini can not only recognize what you do, but it can be your memory. When I finished with a bunch of demos, I asked Gemini to review what I did and it told me all the different things I did and it has tricks that I didn’t see before as I played a youtube. video and Gemini improvised captions to the youtube video. Google has a few more tricks up its sleeve with Android Xr. One of them is the automatic conversion of two D photos into 3D, which is something that Apple also does now with Vision pro, but they also do it for videos. I watched a video clip on the headset that was already pre-converted. Uh Google said, but I also saw a YouTube clip that had been converted. I didn’t see the conversion process live, but it was pretty wild to see that this ability will be there. So here’s all the mixed reality stuff that’s going to be on this developer headset that’s meant for people to start getting a feel for it and build a kind of starting point for everything else. But then there are the glasses that I put on these glasses that look like uh Meta ray bands, kind of thick but quite normal and wireless. And there was a sample on these glasses, a small area here etched with waveguides and a micro led display projector there that was able to give me a head sample. What I could do with it. A lot of things I can activate Gemini with a button here and turn it into a way still in Gemini. Identify the works of art on the wall in a fixed living room set, identify the questions about the objects. I had questions about the books. I can again point to certain things and have you talk about them to me and translate them. You can translate things and then ask for the language again. And what I found fascinating is that they also do live interactive translations. Then someone in the room came and spoke to me in Spanish, instantly brought up not only the captions for what they were saying to me in English, but also brought it up in English when they started speaking in Spanish. All of these things assume that you will always have a Gemini assistant in your life. Now with conversation responses that might feel very intrusive, but on the glasses, you can pause it just by tapping on the side and basically suspending it. But it was very different from something like meta ray bands that assumed you wouldn’t use it until you asked for it. It was like it looks like you have it on until you want to pause it. And the same goes for VR and mixed reality. I’m going to turn on Gemini and then suddenly have this rush all the time that could really impact the experience of how to use the app? It’s fascinating for things like let’s say I’m playing a game and I want to know a tutorial or I have questions about something. It breaks the fourth wall of VR and AR and can change the way applications are developed. But let’s take a step back. This is all for developers now and Android Xr will be unveiled in a fuller state next year. According to Google and Samsung will announce and go into more details about what is potentially very expensive. The next reality headset will be again, expected to be like a vision professor and many people will not need to buy it, but there will be. The other thing that is really interesting is where all the glasses are going and that it could be the year after we start with these types of assistive glasses, there are already other partners in the works like X reel. We just saw some glasses made by them. Google is going to have a lot of different partners that are making AI and AR lenses that work right now that are going to work with phones. Well, the ball will be in Apple’s court. When will Apple introduce generative AI to the Vision pro? And when will Apple begin to allow connection to the iPhone for vision products? Because now it won’t happen. But I think it’s really key to what’s coming next and it looks like it’s going to make uh the idea of ​​everyday glasses feel a lot more instantaneous, but we don’t really know the battery life. So, this is a wild card here that could be quite significant. It’s a lot to digest and I’m still digesting it in my head. You have questions that I’m sure you’ll leave below and I’ll follow up with more as we learn more about it. But I was happy to get the demo and asked a lot more questions about what AI will be in VR and AR than I ever had before. Thanks for watching.