Samsung officially reveals Project Moohan, its Vision Pro competitor, at its Galaxy Event later today. The company has so far allowed tech writers to try a prototype, but there is still a great deal we don’t yet know – including the official name of the device.
Our sister site 9to5Google got a chance to try the prototype in December of last year and Abner Li was impressed. MKBHD was too, saying the key difference from Vision Pro was the onboard AI capabilities …
What we know so far
Li’s view was that it was generally on a par with Vision Pro, but the AI features made it something “wildly new.”
Android XR seems to be on par with visionOS, while offering something wildly new yet natural with Gemini and Project Astra.
Marques Brownlee agreed that this made a massive difference.
At any point you can just go home and and hit the Gemini button and just talk to it. Basically it starts running an instance of Gemini live in the background – you know, the live conversational version of Gemini that you can sort of talk back and forth with and carry on a full conversation with.
Also, Gemini is multimodal, which in the headset means that it can see everything that you’re seeing so you can ask Gemini about something that’s just in front of you and it can give you answers just like as if you’d taken a picture of it with your phone. So it can translate signs or answer trivia questions or just tell you about what you’re looking at […]
This is a massive difference versus The Vision Pro which has no apple intelligence features, no AI features at all and probably won’t be getting any anytime soon.
The four things we hope to learn today
While hands-on sessions with the prototype have given us a very good idea of what to expect, there are four things we don’t yet know, starting with the name of the device. So far, Samsung has only used the code name Project Moohan.
Second, is the final device essentially just a slightly more polished version of the prototype, or are there additional features which the company hasn’t yet shown?
Third, when will it go on sale? Although today is the official launch, the company has previously said that it won’t go on sale until some point next year. The company will hopefully get more specific today.
Finally, and crucially, how much will it cost? The very high price of Vision Pro is the primary reason that this has so far been a niche product. Apple wanted to get it into the hands of developers and early adopters so that it could begin the journey of jointly figuring out how it will be useful. Will Samsung be taking the same approach, or will it give us something significantly more affordable?
The relevance for Apple users
It’s extremely unlikely that anyone deeply embedded into the Apple ecosystem would consider Samsung’s headset rather than an Apple Vision device. But it’s still an important development because it provides competition which is likely to spur both future feature development and at least some degree of price competitiveness.
The livestream begins at 7pm PT/10pm ET, and you can watch it here:
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Photo: Samsung
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