If you watched Samsung Unpacked 2023 earlier this week, you know that the company announced a new Extended Reality initiative, or XR. What we didn’t get were any details about the actual physical product – and that’s where the new leak comes in.
As noted Galaxy Club (opens in a new tab) (By SamMobile (opens in a new tab)), the battery, which just passed regulatory certification in South Korea, corresponds to a specific model number that rumors associated with Samsung’s upcoming device last year.
This device with the model number SM-I120 was considered something of a wearable AR/VR device. Add an announcement for Samsung Unpacked and the look of this battery module, and it looks like this hardware product is on its way.
Goodbye Gear VR
We can’t glean that much information from a leaked battery – we don’t know the capacity, for example – but it points to a standalone device that can run independently without being connected to a computer or smartphone.
This is different from the Samsung Gear VR series, devices where you had to insert your phone. We can expect a pretty clean break from the virtual reality hardware Samsung has pushed out in the past.
It’s worth remembering that this may not be the product Samsung was talking about in Unpacked, in partnership with Qualcomm and Google – in fact, it may just be a prototype. But it’s an interesting look at what’s coming in the future.
Analysis: what is Augmented Reality anyway?
Terms like virtual reality and augmented reality can be difficult to master – especially when companies use them in different ways. A label attached to something by one manufacturer may not be the same as a label applied by another manufacturer.
Most people agree that virtual reality (VR) refers to completely enclosed digital worlds (see, for example, Oculus Quest 2). Augmented reality (AR) refers to placing digital overlays on the physical world, and is something that can now be done with the cameras in many smartphones (see Google Maps Live View).
There are also devices that, in a sense, combine these two elements: mixed reality (MR). Perhaps the best example of this is Microsoft HoloLens, although the term is quite hard to define – sometimes it means a more supercharged, interactive version of AR, and sometimes it means VR with a bit of AR (e.g. moved to a virtual world).
Augmented reality (XR) is mostly used as an all-encompassing term that includes AR, VR and MR – which means Samsung hasn’t divulged too much when telling us it’s working on a new technology. Expect the leaks and rumors to continue.