The Metaverse – Late Entrant

Google and Samsung are getting closer.

• Google has finally launched its play for The Metaverse with the launch of Android XR where it has sensibly decided to leave the hardware to Samsung and Qualcomm in what may be the beginning of the end of Google making consumer devices.
• Google has launched Android XR which is a version of Android that has been optimised for head-mounted displays.
• This means that it will share a basic level of compatibility with Android used in smartphones but extra systems such as real-world perception and 3D environments have been added so that both virtual and augmented reality can be added.
• Confusingly, at the same time, Google launched Project Astra powered by Gemini 2.0 (see here) with videos demonstrating its use on a pair of glasses not unlike those shown recently by Meta (Orion).
• I am pretty certain that whatever this product is, it is not running Android XR which brings us to the first limitation of Android XR.
• The capability of a platform needed to run something like the Apple Vision Pro and something like Meta’s Orion are very different and so how a single platform such as Android XR can cover all of these use cases is unclear.
• One possibility would be to use a microkernel OS (like Huawei does with Harmony OS) which gives much greater flexibility in terms of form factors and use cases, but I do not think that this is what Android XR is.
• Instead, it seems to be a compatible version of Android in that apps and services from smartphones will run on it but with the extra components to ensure that it offers a good Metaverse experience.
• This means that it will be next to impossible to have this Android XR running on a pair of glasses because the platform will be too large and too power-hungry to make this a practical reality.
• Consequently, how a single unified XR ecosystem is going to be built without fragmenting the Android XR platform remains a mystery.
• The only product running Android XR that has been announced is Project Moohan which is made by Samsung using Qualcomm’s XR chipset.
• This device looks very similar to the Apple Vision Pro and shares the same approach in terms of implementing The Metaverse backwards.
• Everyone seems to agree that the main use case for The Metaverse is a mixture of the real world and the virtual world but the right way to do it is to overlay the virtual world onto the real.
• The problem with that is that this is very technically demanding so as an interim step, Apple (and now Samsung) are doing it the other way around.
• There is nothing wrong with this intrinsically, but I continue to think that The Metaverse will not take off until the technical problems are solved such that it can be implemented in the right way.
• These announcements are significant because they demonstrate an ever closer collaboration between Samsung and Google where Google does the software and Samsung does the hardware.
• I have long thought that this is what needs to happen for the Android Ecosystem to really compete with the Apple Ecosystem (see here).
• The Metaverse is a great place to test this new form of cooperation as there is very little risk to revenues if it fails.
• If it works, it could completely change the way the relationship works and herald the end of Google making its own hardware products.
• This is something of which Ms Porat is almost certain to approve of.