Samsung to launch its Apple Vision Pro rival headset this year

Samsung will launch its extended reality headset this year, a spokesperson for the company told CNBC on Tuesday.

The device, dubbed Project Moohan, is Samsung’s answer to Apple‘s $3,500 Vision Pro, which was launched last year.

Samsung teased the headset last year but put it on display for the first time globally at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Samsung refers to the product as “extended reality” or XR device which aims to merge the digital and physical world. However, there are currently few details about the device. Four cameras are visible in the front lens of the physical headset and there appears to be touch controls on the side.

Samsung worked alongside both Qualcomm and Google to develop a new kind of operating system for these kind of devices, known as the Android XR platform.

In December, Samsung said Google Gemini would be installed in the headset allowing wearers to experience a “conversation user interface.”

This would presumably enable users to interact with Gemini, Google’s AI assistant, to help navigate through apps and tasks. The cameras also suggest there will be some sort of gesture control similar to Apple’s Vision Pro.

“To me, the breakthrough technology is a combination of advanced vision capability with intelligence that understands user intention. I think without the intelligence part, it’s a defective product,” Patrick Chomet, executive vice president at Samsung’s mobile division, told CNBC in an interview on Tuesday.

Chomet hinted at a world envisioned by many consumer electronics firms, where smarter AI digital assistants are able to more intuitively understand user requirements on a device.

Samsung was one of the early players in virtual reality headsets, a market that never really took off the way many companies had predicted. But with technology advancing in areas from displays to chips, mixed or extended reality has been touted by big players as a new frontier in computing.

Samsung teased a future product roadmap during a January presentation when it launched its flagship S25 series of smartphones. One slide of the presentation showed outlines of future devices including a trifold smartphone, similar to Huawei’s Mate XT, as well as the Project Moohan headset.

The final product was a pair of glasses, which could hint at a different type of future XR headset. Smart glasses offer similar experiences to a headset but without wearing a bulky device.

Companies including Meta, Snap and XReal have been developing so-called augmented reality glasses. AR is when digital images are overlaid on the real world in front of you.

CNBC reported last year that Samsung, Qualcomm and Google were collaborating on a mixed-reality set of glasses. Samsung appeared to confirm such a collaboration at the S25 event in January.

Chomet did not give a timeline for the launch of a glasses product. However, he said that it is likely people will use multiple devices.

“Probably for quite some time still the smartphone will be the most used device,” Chomet said. “I see a world where people have various things including in their home, in their car. And the device will help you accomplish what you need to accomplish.”