[As this essay from SamMobile notes, right now artificial intelligence exists mainly in “apps and browser windows,” but the new Samsung Galaxy XR headset and others like it “move AI from its current state into an embodied, spatial and truly interactive being.” As the author writes, this new (medium-as-social-actor presence-evoking) capability will create both benefits and dangers. –Matthew]

Galaxy XR’s biggest breakthrough isn’t what you might think, here’s why

It’s where you meet AI halfway.

By Adnan Farooqui
October 27, 2025

There’s been a lot of excitement for Samsung’s first extended reality headset. It was launched as the Galaxy XR last week. The device provides a blend of spatial computing with AI capabilities to deliver an entirely new type of user experience.

Some of you may remember that this isn’t Samsung’s first attempt at making a headset. It had launched the Gear VR nearly a decade ago, but that was a different kind of device. It wasn’t a standalone device, in that you had to slot in your compatible Galaxy phone to experience content in virtual reality.

It primarily existed to let users consume content. There were no AI features to speak of, no business use case, and no special hardware. That’s also why the Gear VR cost a few hundred dollars while the Galaxy XR costs $1,799. It’s a different beast.

The average user might still view it from that lens, though, that it’s a product meant for content consumption in the spatial realm. They may feel that its utility doesn’t expand beyond the novelty of watching content on a virtual screen that’s as big as a movie theater or playing games within that environment.

The software stack is admittedly very limited right now, so all of the use cases aren’t immediately evident right now, but don’t let that distract you from the simple fact that the Galaxy XR is laying the groundwork to solve a foundational problem for artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence, the kind that talks back to you, mainly exists within apps and browser windows right now. It’s either text or moving lines on a screen as a somewhat robotic voice answers your query.

Nothing’s embodied, it doesn’t exist within space you occupy, but that changes with extended reality headsets like the Galaxy XR. It moves AI from its current state into an embodied, spatial and truly interactive being.

Spatial computing blends your surroundings with the digital world, blurring the line between the two in a way that our phones can’t. It’s what might finally make AI feel like it has a sense of presence, a perspective, a body, almost. While we’ve historically designed interfaces to be able to talk to machines, XR might deliver us the first interface that enables us to think with the machines.

The Galaxy XR has many capabilities that can enable precisely that. AI can rely on the headset’s eye tracking, hand tracking, and passthrough camera capabilities to understand what you’re looking at, what you’re doing, and how it can be of better assistance.

You’re not just snapping a photo of an interesting painting and letting AI tell you about its history through text, rather, you’re forming a shared visual understanding with AI in the spatial realm that feels more like home for the machine than it does for you.

It also enables AI to move beyond just responding to your inputs, rather, it gets access to an unbroken stream of spatial, visual, and behavioral data to utilize that context for better responses. AI becomes an observer and a participant, a true real-time companion.

It may understandably feel a bit dystopian but it’s hard to argue that this isn’t where things are headed with artificial intelligence. Some of the top companies across the globe aren’t burning billions of dollars just to help users generate their school assignments with a few sentences. It’s important to be mindful of where it could all lead and to insist on appropriate guardrails.

Google’s one of those companies, and its multimodal AI models are at the heart of the Galaxy XR experience. The headset itself is powered by Google’s Android XR platform which will undoubtedly be [the case when] many other manufacturers also come out with their own headsets.

Samsung’s dominant position as the leading Android OEM also hands it a unique opportunity to lead the way in extended reality experiences as well. How the company decides to proceed here will undoubtedly have a ripple effect on the entire industry. There’s reason here to be cautiously curious about the fate of AI and XR that’s feels like manifest destiny, it may end up surprising us all.