A recent report from South Korea’s Yonhap News maintains Samsung is set to unveil a pair of XR glasses at its annual Unpacked product event, which is expected to take place sometime next month.
Samsung promised back in July we’d be hearing more about its forthcoming “XR platform” before the end of this year, which it’s developing in partnership with Google and Qualcomm.
We still don’t know precisely what form its “XR platform” will take, with previous rumors suggesting work on an Apple Vision Pro competitor in addition to a Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses competitor, as reported in October by The Information.
Now, a Yonhap News report (via Techradar) maintains Samsung is expected to unveil some sort of device on stage, coming in the shape of “regular glasses or sunglasses, and weigh[ing] around 50g.”
The report notes the device is expected to have a payment function, gesture recognition, and facial recognition, and further maintains industry insiders expect the product to launch around Q3 2025. Its Android-powered XR software is also expected to be unveiled sometime this month.
While Yonhap calls the device “AR glasses” (machine translated from Korean), the rumored weight and the lack of any mention of built-in displays suggests it may be closer in function to Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses instead of something like Meta’s Orion AR glasses prototype.
You can read more about the difference between AR glasses and smart glasses in our handy primer, although here’s the short of it: smart glasses don’t overlay immersive imagery, instead providing the user with access to data you might otherwise use on a smartphone or smartwatch, be it a visual heads-up display, or audio output, such as the case of Ray-Ban Meta. AR headsets on the other hand do overlay immersive imagery, like HoloLens 2 or Meta Orion, and are consequently more expensive and difficult to build as a result.
Provided Samsung is indeed releasing a pair of smart glasses and not a full-fledged AR device, it would be in good company. According to Meta, its smart glasses partnership with Ray-Ban has been very successful since the product’s initial release in 2021, prompting Meta to extend its smart glasses collaboration with parent company EssilorLuxottica into 2030. China’s Xiaomi is also reportedly preparing such a device with the help of long-standing ODM Goertek, which is reported to “fully benchmark” against Ray-Ban Meta.
Notably, this follows a string of Samsung trademarks ostensibly geared towards the next generation of XR devices. In mid-2023, the South Korean tech giant filed the name ‘Samsung Glasses’ with the UK’s Intellectual Property Office. In early 2024, Samsung filed a similar trademark request with the United States Patent and Trademark Office for ‘Galaxy Glasses’.
Whatever the case, Samsung hasn’t intimated when Unpacked will kick off, which typically takes place in January or February. An Android Police report suggests however the date has leaked: January 23rd in San Francisco, California.
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