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My thoughts on the Galaxy XR and new Android XR features after an extended demo

It's been a little over 2 months since the Galaxy XR launched, but I'm betting most of y'all haven't tried it yet considering it's a) $1800 and b) only sold in the U.S. and South Korea. I myself only tried it out twice before: once at I/O for like 5 minutes and again at a friend's place (but without prescription inserts so the experience wasn't ideal).

At CES this week, Samsung [gave me an extended demo](https://i.ibb.co/cS9h1QL9/IMG-20260106-133301-762.jpg) (~40 minutes) of the Galaxy XR (disclaimer: Samsung invited me to CES to check out their products), showing off many of the existing but also some upcoming features. While I wasn't allowed/able to record any footage from the headset itself, I can talk about what I experienced.

**Galaxy XR headset**: Samsung has been talking up how light and comfortable its headset is since launch, and I indeed didn't feel any discomfort while wearing it. You feel the weight a bit on your forehead but I wasn't finding myself adjusting it during use to alleviate pressure or anything. However, I only spent about 40 minutes in the thing; I would want to watch a full-length movie on it to really test how comfortable it is.

The displays are really really good. I'm not much of a VR guy, but I can see myself watching a lot of media on this thing and not feeling like I'm getting a worse experience than just watching on my TV at home. The camera passthrough is also pretty good, I could clearly see people/objects in the room I was doing the demo in. I didn't do any augmented reality demos, though, so I can't comment on how those use cases function.

The automatic IPD adjustment is nice. You just press a button and it automatically adjusts the lens to improve clarity.

**Galaxy XR UI**: Navigating the UI feels pretty intuitive. Hand tracking was pretty accurate, selecting items and bringing up menus/going home with pinch gestures worked very consistently. Moving windows (pinching on the titlebar and dragging), resizing windows (pinching with both hands and pulling/pushing), and closing windows (pinching on the X button) worked well. The device overall performed pretty well in my demo, I didn't notice any lagging or slowdown during use.

The home screen launcher is pretty minimalist, it's just a horizontally scrolling list of your apps. Speaking of apps, you can install most apps from the Google Play Store, including YouTube and Netflix. I didn't get to try this during my demo, but I would love to see how well it handles PC VR streaming (both as an external monitor/infinite canvas workspace and VR gaming). That would probably be my number 1 use case of the Galaxy XR tbh.

**Demoes**

* **Google Photos**: You can scroll through your Google Photos library and see spatialized versions of all your content. I think Photos uses ML to create depth information in your photo library, and then the headset uses that to make your photos appear 3D. Meaning, this should work on all your existing photos. It's really cool to be able to relive old memories this way.

* **Google Maps**: You get a 3D top-down satellite view of any city available in Google Maps. You can pinch and push/pull to move around, pinch with both hands and push/pull to zoom in/out, and select highlighted businesses to "go inside." Going inside gives you a spatial view of the inside of the establishment, e.g. the inside look of a restaurant if you want to see what seating is like before making a reservation. I don't think this is supported in all buildings, but it's pretty neat.

* **Gemini**: Gemini can be invoked on any screen and it works within apps. Eg. while in Google Photos, you can share your screen with Gemini and then talk to it to ask it questions about things in your photos. Or in Google Maps, you can tell it to navigate to a specific city rather than manually type that in yourself. You can invoke Gemini by pressing and holding the button on the top right of the headset (called the "Top" button).

* **YouTube**: YouTube is

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