In early 2023 Samsung officially announced it was working on an XR headset, with Google handling the system software via a new variant of Android, now known to be called Android XR, and Qualcomm providing the chipset, which it later announced as Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2, a higher-end variant of the base XR2 Gen 2 used in Meta Quest 3. Business Insider’s Hugh Langley, who previously revealed the existence of Android XR before it was publicly known, cites “a person familiar with the internal timeline” as saying the headset was originally set to launch earlier this year, but the current launch timeline is now March 2025.
I’m kind of reluctant to buy a headset with Google’s new VR OS on it. Cardboard was kind of fun until they cancelled it. Daydream wasn’t very good because they gave it a 2dof controller, but then they finally added 6dof head tracking–but then they cancelled the project before the headset actually came out (the one with 6dof tracking, I know the 3dof daydream headset exists, I have one. I think the 6dof one did come out [Lenovo Mirage] but the project was already dead at that point). So that was a bust. They also had project Tango for AR, but then they cancelled that right around the time an actually decent phone with support for it came out. And there was the VR180 video format, where they teamed up a bunch of hardware manufacturers, but then most of those never actually made it to market either and they dropped all the language about the project from their website. They also had that lightfield video project that allowed you to move around within a small volume, but they cancelled that project too.
Google’s attention span with VR projects just seems to average about a year, and I don’t want to shell out high-end headset money for something that might get bricked in an year.