Apple and Android's new battlefield? Report: Samsung, Alphabet-C, and Qualcomm are developing MR devices that will be launched as early as this year.

At the launch event of the new generation of MR headset Vision Pro, Cook made a bold statement: Apple Vision Pro will usher in a new era of spatial computing.

However, it is obvious that Apple's old rivals do not want to see the scene of Apple dominating the spatial computing era alone. A battle similar to Android vs iOS may soon spread to MR.

The battle has quietly begun. While Apple's WWDC conference has attracted a lot of attention, Alphabet-C, Samsung, and Qualcomm in the Android camp are also quietly working hard.

According to the Korean media Business Korea, Alphabet-C, Samsung, and Qualcomm are developing MR products, with Alphabet-C responsible for developing MR operating systems, Samsung and Qualcomm responsible for developing MR hardware and dedicated chips respectively. It is expected that the product will be released as early as this year.

In February, Samsung submitted a trademark application for Galaxy Glasses to the Korean Intellectual Property Office. Business Korea quoted industry insiders as saying that Samsung's MR products may be thinner and look like glasses, rather than ski goggles like Apple's Vision Pro.

Earlier, at the Google I/O conference in May, Sameer Samat, vice president of Alphabet-C products, revealed that the company is collaborating with Samsung in the XR (ie, AR/VR/MR) field and will share more information later this year.

This is the first cooperation of the Android camp in the MR market. Previously, Alphabet-C had launched the VR project Daydream, but abandoned it after a few years of development; Samsung also launched a VR headset in 2014, but has not updated related products since then.

Currently, common VR headsets on the market, such as Pico from ByteDance and Quest from Meta, all have operating systems based on customized development of the Android system, and the Android camp has no operating system dedicated to virtual reality scenarios. The Vision OS running on Apple Vision Pro is an operating system developed by Apple specifically for MR.

As the Android group follows in Apple's footsteps to develop MR devices, industry insiders are very concerned about the growth potential of this market. Market research company Counterpoint Research predicts that the shipment volume of global XR headsets will increase from 18 million units in 2022 to 110 million units in 2025, and will reach 1 billion units in 2030.