XR headsets remain technologically impressive. But bulky designs, high prices and some design tradeoffs have curtailed mass appeal. — Unsplash
In the not-too-distant future, a single pair of stylish smart glasses will function as your personal movie theatre. They’ll provide walking directions as you explore a new city or let you peek at group texts during a work meeting. You might ask an AI assistant to translate a restaurant menu when traveling abroad or suggest a movie. You’ll be able to view 3D photos and videos that poignantly bring memories back to life. Or perhaps you’ll create a futuristic work setup with virtual displays that look nearly as sharp as physical monitors.
But we haven’t arrived at that moment yet. In 2025, consumers still need to make a choice. Option A: Sleek, lightweight smart glasses like the popular Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, which can capture photos and videos while also putting an AI assistant in your ear. You can wear these out in the world and still look perfectly normal.
Option B: Immersive "mixed-reality” headsets like the Meta Quest line, Apple Inc’s Vision Pro and the recently released Galaxy XR, co-developed by Samsung Electronics Co. and Alphabet Inc’s Google. These are essentially computers for your face, and they look the part.
They’re also not exactly hot sellers. Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has conceded that the Vision Pro "is not a mass-market product,” largely owing to its US$3,499 price. Meta’s US$500 Quest 3 is far more affordable, but nowhere near as advanced. Samsung’s US$1,800 Galaxy XR is meant to land somewhere in the middle.
All of these XR headsets remain technologically impressive. But bulky designs, high prices and some design tradeoffs have curtailed mass appeal. We’re starting to see glimpses of what next-generation smart glasses will be able to offer but, right now, the latest headsets from Apple and Samsung are as good as it gets if you want to escape to a virtual world – or blend it with the real one.
Samsung’s headset is the first to run Android XR, a new version of Google’s mobile operating system that’s been tailored for mixed-reality devices. Accordingly, it serves as a showcase for Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence assistant and includes enhanced, immersive versions of YouTube, Google Photos and Google Maps. The Galaxy XR even manages to match some of the Vision Pro’s best hardware features, at roughly half the price.
But after a week using the Galaxy XR and Apple’s new Vision Pro, now with a much-improved headband and faster M5 chip, the old adage has proven true: You get what you pay for. Apple’s head start on visionOS has resulted in a better-thought-out user experience. While Samsung’s headset has a slightly more tempting price, both of these devices are niche luxury items, and very few consumers will buy them. But they’re an important stepping stone and a canvas for exploring ideas before mainstream AR glasses inevitably take hold.
Hardware
While the Vision Pro has long been widely criticized for being too heavy, Samsung prioritized a lightweight design for the Galaxy XR. It has a hard plastic headband that tightens via a knob on the back, and the company threw in several forehead "spacers” to help people find the right fit.
But that fixed, rigid design brings a different set of tradeoffs. The rear-mounted adjustment dial can make it unpleasant to use the Galaxy XR when lying in bed or on the couch. By contrast, Apple’s updated strap includes thick, adjustable padding for both the back and top of your head, which allowed me to comfortably use the Vision Pro for long stretches, including an entire movie. Still, the headset becomes tiring after extended use.
To its credit, the Vision Pro looks and feels like a more premium device, and several of its components like the head strap and light seal are user replaceable. If anything on the Galaxy XR breaks, the whole unit will need to be repaired.
I do appreciate how, by default, the Galaxy XR lets you maintain some peripheral vision below the lenses and at your sides. You can add magnetic inserts to fully envelope yourself in the virtual realm, but I preferred to leave them off. It’s convenient being able to look down and clearly see your phone or a connected Bluetooth keyboard.
Both headsets use sharp, high-resolution Micro-OLED displays for each eye, but the Vision Pro runs at a smoother 120-hertz refresh rate. The Galaxy XR, meanwhile, is limited to 72 hertz by default. That difference matters more in passthrough mode when you’re looking around at your environment and any kind of delay or blur can lead to discomfort. It’s less of an issue when focusing on apps or watching videos, and neither headset ever caused me any motion sickness.
The Vision Pro’s built-in speakers also offer fuller sound than the Galaxy XR, but I recommend wireless earbuds either way for the best possible audio.
Controls
The physical controls vary slightly between the two headsets, but each provides an easy way of bringing up the home screen, adjusting the volume and quickly alternating between passthrough and virtual environments, making it easy to master the basics.
Both headsets have an external battery pack that must remain connected for the device to function and be recharged over USB-C. It takes time to get accustomed to this tethered setup, and during my first few days using the Vision Pro and Galaxy XR, both batteries took their share of tumbles – as did the headsets whenever I forgot to remove a battery pack from my pocket. Fortunately, they’re no worse for wear.
By default, the two headsets differ in their user experience. Apple’s Vision Pro uses sophisticated eye tracking: You simply look at what you want to select, and then pinch with your thumb and index finger. But the Galaxy XR relies much more on hand tracking. Wherever you point, a small onscreen cursor appears, and you do the same pinching gesture to confirm a selection or grab an onscreen window you want to move. It’s possible to enable eye-only tracking in the XR’s settings if you’d rather mimic the Vision Pro approach, but because Samsung’s eye tracking isn’t as precise, the end result is markedly worse. I stuck with the hand tracking system.
But even then, Samsung has growing pains to sort out. The Vision Pro occasionally misses a pinch gesture here and there, but it’s a recurring frustration on the Galaxy XR, which often struggles to recognize hand-tracking pinches in dimmer settings. Hopefully the company can remedy this with future software updates. In brighter conditions, I rarely encountered issues. Typing on the virtual keyboard is another area where Apple’s headset proved more intuitive – and more reliable across lighting conditions.
Software
Power both devices on, and it’s clear that Android XR has taken many cues from visionOS. Their floating app grids are similar. The gestures for resizing app windows are identical, and so is the shortcut for bringing up the homescreen: looking at your palm and pinching your thumb and index finger together.
With both headsets, you can open apps and position them wherever you’d like in 3D space and even in different rooms. Want a movie to fill an entire wall? You can make it so. Multiple browser windows can be strewn about for easy reference as you work on a presentation or spreadsheet. Revisiting your photos is more engaging and powerful at this life-sized scale than scrolling through them on a phone, and both headsets let you "spatialize” images to give them greater depth and briefly make it seem like you’re right back in a special moment.
But visionOS shows that Apple has put a lot of thought into spatial computing. It’s elegant, requires less effort, and is just nicer to look at. Translucency is used across the system, with windows accurately reflecting the lighting in your room. Everything comes off as more "real” and does a better job of tricking your brain into believing these apps are something you can walk up to and actually touch.
Apple’s M5 chip vastly outperforms the Qualcomm Inc Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 processor inside the Galaxy XR, which might explain why Samsung’s headset lacks the same graphical niceties. Samsung’s virtual environments are also less detailed than the lifelike backdrops you can surround yourself with using the Vision Pro.
Apple is also better at understanding physical space. The Vision Pro lets you place virtual widgets throughout your home – a clock, photo frame, music player or the weather forecast – and remembers exactly where you left them even after powering the headset off or taking it to another location. Come back, and you’ll find those widgets anchored on the same wall.
On the Galaxy XR, meanwhile, windows occasionally drift from where you originally put them (especially in dim light), and it’s not as easy to "push” apps to a spot farther away in the room without literally standing up and dragging them there. Widgets aren’t yet available on the platform either.
Samsung’s persona avatars aren’t much better: They look cartoonish and elementary compared with the hyper-realistic personas that the Vision Pro can create with a few facial scans. Samsung has indicated that more lifelike avatars are coming at some point in the future.
Multimedia
What the Galaxy XR lacks in polish, it tries to make up for with apps. Samsung’s headset includes some you won’t find on visionOS, such as YouTube, YouTube TV, Google Maps and Netflix. The Android XR version of YouTube has a dedicated section for 180- and 360-degree videos. Google Maps’ immersive overhead view makes it feel like you’re flying through cities, and you can tour many indoor locations with ground-level walkthroughs.
Unfortunately, Netflix on Android XR is merely a blown-up version of the tablet app that isn’t particularly optimized for mixed reality. But it’s still better than nothing. These services can all be accessed through a web browser on the Vision Pro. That’s a fine workaround, but it means sacrificing features like offline downloads for YouTube and Netflix.
Watching movies is a terrific experience on either headset: The displays are plenty bright, colors are vivid, and the image clarity is noticeably superior to what you’d get from something like the US$650 Xreal One Pro. Those glasses are much smaller and easy to take anywhere, but they can’t produce the same illusion of a private movie theatre on your face.
One glaring issue is that Samsung’s headset currently doesn’t include a travel mode. On the Vision Pro, activating this feature keeps virtual windows planted in front of you even on a fast-moving train or airplane. The XR’s lack of an equivalent setting means windows will keep whizzing by as you move, making it impossible to do much of anything. This is something the company needs to rectify in a hurry.
AI
The Galaxy XR’s real standout feature is its deep integration of Google Gemini. On the Vision Pro, Apple’s Siri assistant is competent at opening apps and changing settings. Apple Intelligence includes a handful of generative AI-powered features like writing tools. But Gemini has a big advantage: It can see the world around you. You can ask it for more details about what’s in front of you or "circle” a specific item with your finger – like a book or food item – to get more granular.
Gemini is also aware of what’s on your screen inside the headset. When browsing a streaming app, you can ask what reviews say about the movie you’ve highlighted. If you’re wandering Google Maps, you can inquire about whatever landmark is in front of you. And you can ask Gemini to organize your virtual windows if things get too haphazard.
The experience is compelling, but right now it’s held back by fundamental design limitations. No one’s going to wear the tethered Galaxy XR in public or bring it outside, leaving Gemini’s real-world vision confined to the home. But it’s clear that Google’s AI is primed and ready for smaller, slimmer smart glasses; now we just need the hardware to catch up.
Productivity
Both companies market these mixed-reality devices as a way to augment your home workspace. In the case of the Vision Pro, you can link the headset with any modern Mac and choose your preferred size of virtual display: standard, wide and ultra-wide are available. The resolution was high enough for me to focus on writing, emails and Slack chats without any eye strain. If anything, the headset’s weight was more of a hindrance after a couple hours of continuous use.
Samsung offers a similar productivity feature, but it only works with the company’s own Galaxy Book laptops. Allowing the Galaxy XR to support all Windows PCs would unlock tremendous potential. For now, if you don’t own a Galaxy Book, you’ll need third-party software to connect the Galaxy XR to a computer – or stick to working within the headset, where you can use the Android versions of productivity apps from Google and Microsoft Corp.
The takeaway
At roughly half the price of the Vision Pro, Samsung’s Galaxy XR is great as a personal cinema. Apps like Google Maps and Photos offer fun new tricks that are exclusive to Android XR, and Gemini shows heaps of potential. But the hardware feels cheaper, and many aspects of the experience are underbaked, which Samsung can potentially address via future software updates. It’s worth holding off until improvements come along.
By contrast, Apple’s headset offers a meaningfully better overall experience. And visionOS represents a more exciting glimpse into the future. But the Vision Pro’s app library remains spotty, and the company has already shelved a cheaper and lighter version of the device for 2027 to focus on developing smart glasses, Bloomberg has reported. As long as the price stays where it is, only well-heeled gadget enthusiasts should consider buying one.
Either way, everyone other than early adopters should wait until Apple and Samsung shrink their headsets into less geeky, less isolating designs. – Bloomberg
