VR Development

Samsung’s Answer to Vision Pro Reportedly Landing First in Korea This October for Around $2,000

August 25, 2025 From roadtovr

Samsung’s upcoming mixed reality headset Project Moohan has largely been out of the spotlight since its unveiling late last year. According to South Korean outlet Newsworks (Korean), the headset’s launch could be right around the corner.

Citing industry sources, Project Moohan is reportedly set to be featured at Samsung’s upcoming Unpacked event, which is expected to take place in South Korea on September 29th.

The report maintains the headset is set to launch soon thereafter, coming first to South Korea on October 13th, and later to global markets. There’s no word on when or how the alleged global rollout will work.

The device is expected to be priced somewhere between ₩2.5 and ₩4 million South Korean won, or around $1,800 and $2,900 USD, Newsworks maintains.

While markedly cheaper than Apple Vision Pro, which still sells for its early 2024 launch price of $3,500, that still puts Moohan pretty squarely on the prosumer end of the spectrum.

Samsung Project Moohan | Image courtesy The Verge

Ostensibly looking to serve up competition to Vision Pro, Project Moohan is set to be the first mixed reality headset to run Google’s Android XR operating system.

According to its current spec sheet, the headset sports a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 + Gen 2, Sony-sourced micro‑OLED panels (no resolution specs yet), pancake lenses, automatic interpupillary distance (IPD) adjustment, and support for eye and hand-tracking. It’s also set to support VR motion controllers of some sort, although we haven’t seen them yet.

Make sure to check out our hands-on with Project Moohan from December 2024 to learn more, including notes on comfort, display clarity, and our experience with Android XR—which really looks a lot like Horizon OS combined with VisionOS.

Newsworks reports that Samsung is only expecting to ship “around 100,000 units” of the device this year—significantly less than Apple’s alleged 2024 targets for Vision Pro, which third-party analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported last year ranged between 400–450k units. Granted, Samsung doesn’t have a lot of runway left until year’s end, so there’s no telling what it hopes to achieve with Moohan.

Still, industry sources expect Samsung’s XR headset to act as more of stepping stone to its wider smart glasses ambitions, Newsworks says.

Notably, Samsung has yet to announce its own smart glasses amidst a flurry of companies looking to enter the space, including Google’s Android XR smart glasses launching in partnership with America’s Warby Parker and South Korea’s Gentle Monster.

Following the recent launch of Oakley Meta HSTN, Meta is also reportedly expected to release a new pair of smart glasses, this time including a built-in display and wrist-worn controller, according to a recent report.

Chinese tech giant Xiaomi also recently launched its own smart glasses, which go toe-to-toe with Ray-Ban Meta, although appear to be exclusive to Mainland China.

Meanwhile, HTC unveiled its ‘VIVE Eagle’ smart glasses, which is shipping first in the company’s native Taiwan at NT$15,600 ($520 USD).

Samsung Confirms ‘Project Moohan’ XR Headset is Still Coming This Year

August 1, 2025 From roadtovr

Samsung didn’t highlight its upcoming mixed reality headset at Unpacked last month, nor at Google I/O the month prior—but no fear, the South Korean tech giant confirmed its Android XR-based headset is still coming this year.

In a recent earnings call, Samsung says its upcoming XR headset, tentatively named ‘Project Moohan’, is still coming. Small recompense, considering we still don’t know its official name, when the device is launching, or at what price.

“Meanwhile, we are also preparing to introduce next-generation innovative products, including our XR headset and TriFold smartphone this year,” confirmed Daniel Araujo of the company’s ‘MX’ mobile division in the company’s Q2 2025 earnings call.

That said, Samsung has seemed pretty reticent to put Project Moohan in the spotlight, which has been less than reassuring. While press demos were available at Google I/O, the headset wasn’t heavily featured there, which seems like a missed opportunity to engage with Android developers—the very people who will be building apps for the upcoming Android XR operating system.

What’s more, Project Moohan was essentially also a no-show at Samsung Unpacked in July, it’s annual product event. Then again, so was its TriFold smartphone, which is also slated to arrive sometime this year, suggesting we might get another mini product event between now and the year’s end.

While we don’t know exactly when Project Moohan is launching, or at what price, here’s what we do know:

Project Moohan runs Android XR via a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 + Gen 2. Its Sony-sourced micro‑OLED panels don’t have resolution specs yet, although it’s supposed to include some slimming pancake lenses, automatic interpupillary distance (IPD) adjustment, support for eye and hand-tracking, optional magnetically-attached light shield, and a removable external battery pack. The headset is also slated to support VR motion controllers of some sort, although we haven’t seen them yet.

To learn more, check out our hands-on with Project Moohan from December 2024, which includes everything from comfort, display clarity, and how Android XR looks a lot like Horizon OS combined with VisionOS.

Meta & Stanford Reveal Ultra-Thin Holographic XR Display the Size of Glasses

July 30, 2025 From roadtovr

Researchers at Meta Reality Labs and Stanford University have unveiled a new holographic display that could deliver virtual and mixed reality experiences in a form factor the size of standard glasses.

In a paper published in Nature Photonics, Stanford electrical engineering professor Gordon Wetzstein and colleagues from Meta and Stanford outline a prototype device that combines ultra-thin custom waveguide holography with AI-driven algorithms to render highly realistic 3D visuals.

Although based on waveguides, the device’s optics aren’t transparent like you might find on HoloLens 2 or Magic Leap One though—the reason why it’s referred to as a mixed reality display and not augmented reality.

At just 3 millimeters thick, its optical stack integrates a custom-designed waveguide and a Spatial Light Modulator (SLM), which modulates light on a pixel-by-pixel basis to create “full-resolution holographic light field rendering” projected to the eye.

Unlike traditional XR headsets that simulate depth using flat stereoscopic images, this system produces true holograms by reconstructing the full light field, resulting in more realistic and naturally viewable 3D visuals.

“Holography offers capabilities we can’t get with any other type of display in a package that is much smaller than anything on the market today,” Wetzstein tells Stanford Report.”

The idea is also to deliver realistic, immersive 3D visuals not only across a wide field-of-view (FOV), but also a wide eyebox—allowing you to move your eye relative to the glasses without losing focus or image quality, or one of the “keys to the realism and immersion of the system,” Wetzstein says.

The reason we haven’t seen digital holographic displays in headsets up until now is due to the “limited space–bandwidth product, or étendue, offered by current spatial light modulators (SLMs),” the team says.

In practice, a small étendue fundamentally limits how large of a field of view and range of possible pupil positions, that is, eyebox, can be achieved simultaneously.

While the field of view is crucial for providing a visually effective and immersive experience, the eyebox size is important to make this technology accessible to a diversity of users, covering a wide range of facial anatomies as well as making the visual experience robust to eye movement and device slippage on the user’s head.

The project is considered the second in an ongoing trilogy. Last year, Wetzstein’s lab introduced the enabling waveguide. This year, they’ve built a functioning prototype. The final stage—a commercial product—may still be years away, but Wetzstein is optimistic.

The team describes it as a “significant step” toward passing what many in the field refer to as a “Visual Turing Test”—essentially the ability to no longer “distinguish between a physical, real thing as seen through the glasses and a digitally created image being projected on the display surface,” Suyeon Choi said, the paper’s lead author.

This follows a recent reveal from researchers at Meta’s Reality Labs featuring ultra-wide field-of-view VR & MR headsets that use novel optics to maintain a compact, goggles-style form factor. In comparison, these include “high-curvature reflective polarizers,” and not waveguides as such.

Sharp Unveils Prototype VR Controller, Combining Haptic Gloves & Standard Buttons

July 22, 2025 From roadtovr

Sharp announced it’s releasing a prototype VR haptic controller in Japan, which aims to reproduce the sense of touch in VR while serving a familiar button layout.

Japan-based Sharp says its VR haptic controllers can let users sense texture thanks to “multi-segmented tactile elements” placed on the device’s fingertips. Various vibration patterns on the surface are meant to convey different textures, such as smooth, rough, etc., the company says.

“Although the haptics are not at a level that reproduces the real thing, by changing the parameters we have been able to achieve a variety of tactile sensations,” Sharp says on the project’s Japan-facing website. “Rather than leaving it in-house until the developers are satisfied with it, we plan to work with our users to improve the quality of the content.”

Sharp says the device, which will arrive in a left and right pair, “does not allow for delicate finger tracking like glove types.” It also lacks force feedback, or any sort of temperature feedback.

The prototype is supposed to also function like a standard controller, including sticks and buttons, the company says. One thing that isn’t clear though is how the gloves will be tracked, which Sharp says could include mounts for “high market share” tracking standards.

Sharp says the device is currently undergoing demonstration experiments, so it’s not clear whether it will eventually be commercialized; we haven’t seen anything beyond renders at this time. The company is aiming to put early iterations of the device in the hands of the paying public though, at least in Japan.

The company recently closed pre-registrations through its Japan-facing website, pricing units at ¥100,000 (~$680). “Please note that development or release may be canceled,” the company warns.

Granted, Sharp has more experience in XR than you might think. As the leading OEM supplier of high-end VR displays, at one time Sharp was the top display supplier for Meta Quest 2. In late 2024, Sharp and Japan’s largest telecom NTT Docomo also launched a pair of AR glasses, called MiRZA.

Pico Reportedly Developing Slim & Light Mixed Reality ‘Goggles’ to Rival Next-Gen Meta Headset

July 18, 2025 From roadtovr

Pico, the XR headset maker owned by TikTok parent ByteDance, is reportedly developing a mixed reality device aimed at rivaling Meta’s next-generation XR headset.

According to a report from The Information, Pico is currently working on a pair of mixed reality “goggles” codenamed ‘Swan’, which are said to be thin and lightweight—reportedly weighing around just 100 grams.

Citing three people with direct knowledge of the project, The Information reports that the device features a hybrid design that offloads processing to a tethered compute puck. This approach allows the glasses portion of the device to be significantly thinner and lighter than current-generation XR headsets like the Quest 3 or Pico 4 Ultra.

Swan is also said to rely primarily on eye and hand tracking for input, moving away from physical controllers. Furthermore, the report notes that Pico is developing “specialized chips for the device that will process data from its sensors to minimize the lag or latency between what a user sees in AR [sic] and their physical movements.”

Swan is said to be conceptually similar to Meta’s reportedly upcoming mixed reality device codenamed ‘Phoenix’, which also includes a compute puck and a glasses-like form factor. According to a recent Wall Street Journal report, Meta’s headset could launch in either 2026 (WSJ’s estimate) or 2027 (as cited by The Information) and may cost under $1,000.

The codename itself is still a matter of speculation: The Information refers to Meta’s headset as ‘Phoenix’, while the WSJ uses ‘Loma’, and online sources have also mentioned ‘Puffin’.

That said, there is currently no information on what Swan will cost or where it will ship. In the past, Pico’s consumer headsets have typically been priced slightly above Meta’s equivalents and have been available primarily in East and Southeast Asia and Europe—but not in North America.

Google Reportedly Set to Acquire Eye-tracking Startup to Bolster Android XR Hardware Efforts

March 13, 2025 From roadtovr

Google is reportedly set to acquire Canada-based eye-tracking startup AdHawk Microsystems Inc., something that would strengthen the company’s ongoing foray into XR headsets and glasses.

As reported by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Google is allegedly acquiring AdHawk for $115 million, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The deal is said to include $15 million in future payments based on the eye-tracking company reaching performance targets. While the acquisition is purportedly slated to conclude this week, a deal still hasn’t been signed, leaving some room for doubt. Furthermore, should the deal go through, the report maintains AdHawk’s staff will join Google’s Android XR team.

This isn’t the first time AdHawk has flirted with an acquisition by a key XR player. In 2022, Bloomberg reported the company was in the final stages of an acquisition by Meta.

Notably, AdHawk is best known for its innovations in eye-tracking, which replaces traditional cameras with micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS), which is said to result in faster processing and reduced power consumption—two things highly prized by AR and smart glasses creators today.

Its flagship product, the MindLink glasses, is a research-focused device that is meant to connect eye movements with neurological and ocular health, human behavior, and state of mind, the company says on its website. Additionally, the company offers its camera-free eye-tracking modules for researchers working with VR devices, such as Meta Quest.

While neither Google nor AdHawk have commented on report, Google is ramping up its XR division to compete with the likes of Meta and Apple.

In December, Google announced Android XR, marking a decisive shift for the company’s XR efforts, as the company is bringing a ‘full fat’ version of Android to headsets for the first time, which not only includes XR-specific apps but also the full slate of Android content. Android XR is ostensibly set to debut on Samsung’s Project Moohan mixed reality headset, which still has no release date or price.

Then, in January, Google announced the acquisition of a number of HTC’s XR engineers, a deal amounting to $250 million. At the time, Google said HTC veterans would “accelerate the development of the Android XR platform across the headsets and glasses ecosystem.”

In addition to supporting its Android XR software efforts, the acquisition of a novel eye-tracking startup would also prove valuable in the company’s internal XR hardware efforts, which has been nothing short of fragmented over the years.

Google has summarily cancelled a number of XR projects in the past, including its Daydream VR platform in 2019, Google Glass for Enterprise in 2023, and its Iris AR glasses project in 2024.