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Samsung teased its efforts with multimodal AI and new form factors including smart glasses and extended reality (XR) devices.
“We can’t wait to share more details later this year,” said Jay Kim, EVP and head of customer experience at Samsung at the company’s Samsung Galaxy S25 Unpacked event today.
As announced in December, Kim said the company is co-developing Android XR ecosystem with Google to change the way we interact with the physical and virtual worlds. They will define the operating system, user interface and hardware.
But Kim didn’t go into the details on the devices or the ongoing partnership with Google.
“These upcoming XR devices with multimodal AI devices will change the way interface with the physical and virtual worlds,” Kim said.
He said Samsung would develop these products with developers and partners.
Google’s Gemini Live AI on Galaxy S25 devices — which have a powerful neural processing unit for on-device AI processing — is a signal of what is coming the future, Kim said. Devices will understand what you see and what you say, he said.
AI is going to give companies like Samsung a second shot to be a player in the XR business. So far, Meta dominates the field with tens of millions of devices sold. Rivals like HTC Vive and Pimax are carving out different parts of the market, but Samsung is likely to challenge both Meta and Apple for the mainstream part of the business, which isn’t as big as once hoped but is still a market in the tens of billions of dollars.
Meta has made XR its area of focus when it comes to devices because it acknowledges it lost a big war when it failed to come up with a smartphone to challenge Apple. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has shifted much of the company’s emphasis to AI investments, but it turns out that better AI for on-the-go devices like smart glasses and XR headsets with mixed reality could be what the market really needs. Google, Samsung, Qualcomm and many others see the opportunity and are investing to make it real.
