Forget Galaxy XR, Samsung has smart glasses coming to rival RayBan Meta

Samsung has just unveiled its hotly anticipated Galaxy XR mixed reality headset, but there’s something arguably more exciting in the works from the company that might have been missed in all the Project Moohan furore.

Towards the end of Samsung’s recent Galaxy Event, it briefly announced plans to launch its own Android XR-based smart glasses.

The South Korean tech giant will be teaming up with Google and fashion brands Gentle Monster and Warby Parker on a lighter form of AI eyewear. Its aim is to create “fashion-forward eyewear that blends cutting-edge AI-native technology with cultural influence and design leadership”.

These fashion-focused glasses will apparently cram “advanced XR capabilities” into a familiar and stylish format, “bringing boundary-free discovery, work and play into daily life”.

Samsung and Meta offer a lens into the future

To our way of thinking, its this latter more discrete team-up that’s most likely to yield a breakthrough product for Samsung and Google.

The full-sized Samsung Galaxy XR is being positioned to take on (and ultimately undercut) the Apple Vision Pro, but we just can’t see that being a fight that most people will be interested in.

Splashing $1,800 on an unwieldy mixed reality headset still doesn’t sound like a particularly mainstream proposition, even if that’s significantly less money than Apple is asking for its Vision Pro.

We were recently impressed with our hands-on of the Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2), which promises a similar combination of style and heads-up AR features to Samsung’s AI glasses – and at a significantly more mainstream price of £379/$379/€419. Apple, too, has been rumoured to be working on a pair of smart glasses.

The Samsung Galaxy XR and the Apple Vision Pro are likely to go down as powerful yet impractical prototypes for a far more subtle and accessible mixed reality future. The trick will be condensing this immersive experience down into a normal(ish) pair of glasses that doesn’t block you off from the world around you – and work is clearly well under way on just such a device.