Android XR is Google’s new operating system for headsets and smart glasses

Google is taking another run at making headsets work. The company just announced Android XR, a new operating system designed specifically for what Google calls “extended reality” devices like headsets and glasses. It’s working with Samsung and lots of other hardware manufacturers to develop those headsets and glasses, is making the new version of Android available to developers now, and hopes to start shipping XR stuff next year.

We don’t yet have a ton of details on exactly how Android XR will work or how it might differ from the Android on your phone. (The Verge’s Victoria Song got to try a few demos and prototypes — make sure you read her story.) Google is making immersive XR versions of apps like Maps, Photos, and YouTube and says it’s developing a version of Chrome that lets you do multiwindow multitasking in your browser. It will also support existing phone and tablet apps from the Play Store, much in the same way Apple supports iPad apps in the Vision Pro.

Google’s Gemini AI, of course, is at the very center of the whole experience. Google has been trying to crack headsets for more than a decade — there was Glass and Cardboard and Daydream, all of which had good ideas but none of which turned into much — and the company thinks AI is the key to making the user experience work. “We believe a digital assistant integrated with your XR experience is the killer app for the form factor, like what email or texting was for the smartphone,” said Sameer Samat, who oversees the Android ecosystem at Google, in a press briefing ahead of the launch. As Gemini becomes more multimodal, too, able to both capture and create audio and video, glasses and headsets suddenly make much more sense.

The choice of the term “XR” for the OS is maybe the most interesting part. There are a million terms and acronyms for this space: there’s virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, extended reality, and others, all of which mean different but overlapping things. XR is probably the broadest of the terms, which seems to be why Google picked it. “When we say extended reality or XR,” Samat said, “we’re really talking about a whole spectrum of experiences, from virtual reality to augmented reality and everything in between.”

Google imagines headsets that can seamlessly transition from virtual worlds to real ones — again like the Vision Pro — and smart glasses that are more of an always-on companion. It’s also interested in audio-only devices like the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. Some things might be standalone; others might be more like an accessory to your phone. We’ll see if Google ends up building its own XR hardware, but it’s clearly trying to support a huge spectrum of devices.

Android XR is still in its early stages, and most developers are only now going to start getting the software and hardware they need to build for the new OS. But Google’s trying to move quickly next year: a device it’s building with Samsung, codenamed Moohan, is apparently slated to ship next year. Android XR is, in some ways, a culmination of bets Google has been making in AI, the broader Android ecosystem, and the wearable future of technology. All of those bets are about to get the real test: whether anyone actually puts them on.