Roh would not elaborate on the specifics of Samsung’s first new XR product, which will not appear at Wednesday’s launch event. “We’re getting there, but we’re not too far away,” he said.
Washington Post
“For the chipset, it is going to be a strategic collaboration with Qualcomm. The hardware will be us,” Roh said. And the software, he added, will be provided by Google.
“For the ecosystem, we were trying to determine which platform to work with,” Roh said. “And in the end, we decided that it was going to be Google,” he added, referring to a new, previously unannounced version of the Android operating system meant specifically to power devices such as wearable displays.
Samsung held its Unpacked PR event in Silicon Valley and among the news stories to come out of it was this one, about an alliance between Samsung, Qualcomm, and Google to build new extended reality (XR) products. Well, we know that Google makes Android, has some AR/VR/XR toolkits in there because, you know, it has to be in the game, and we know that Qualcomm is pretty much the only game in town as a systems board provider for headsets. We also know that there is much speculation about Apple coming out of with its own mixed-reality headset, maybe this year, whatever that may mean. So, yeah, this is the Android alliance to counter the Apple alliance of one.
We may also know that Samsung may never fully realize a mixed reality product. I mean, whenever the words strategic are used in defining relationships you can pretty much assume that it may be nothing more than noise and fireworks to distract from the fact that there is no real plan that all the partners are racing to implement together.
