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Anyone who watched Samsung Unpacked 2023 earlier this week knows that the company announced a new initiative in the field of Extended Reality, or XR. What we didn’t get were details of an actual physical product – which is where a new leak comes in.
As noted by Galaxy Club (opens in new tab) (through SamMobile (opens in new tab)), a battery that just passed regulatory certification in South Korea, matches a particular model number that the rumor mill associated with an upcoming Samsung device last year.
That device, with model number SM-I120, was thought to be some kind of wearable AR/VR. Add to that the Samsung Unpacked announcement and the look of this battery module, and it looks like this hardware product is on its way.
Goodbye Gear VR
We can’t get much information from this battery leak – we don’t know the capacity, for example – but it points to a standalone device that can work on its own, without being connected to a computer or smartphone.
That makes it different from the Samsung Gear VR series, devices that you had to plug a phone into. We can expect a pretty clean break from the virtual reality hardware Samsung has put out in the past.
It’s worth remembering that this might not be the product Samsung was referring to at Unpacked, working with Qualcomm and Google – in fact it could only be a prototype. But it’s an interesting glimpse into what’s to come in the future.
Analysis: what is Extended Reality anyway?
Terms like virtual reality and extended reality can be difficult to master, especially when companies use them in different ways. A label affixed to something by one manufacturer may not mean the same as a label affixed by another manufacturer.
What most people agree on is that virtual reality (VR) refers to fully enclosed digital worlds (see, for example, the Oculus Quest 2). Augmented reality (AR) refers to placing digital overlays on top of the physical world, and this is something you can now do with the cameras on many smartphones (see Google Maps Live View).
Then there are devices that combine the two: mixed reality (MR). Perhaps the best example of this is the Microsoft HoloLens, although the term is pretty hard to pin down – sometimes it means a more supercharged, interactive version of AR, and sometimes it means VR with a touch of AR (like a video call feed dropped into a virtual world).
Extended Reality (XR) is most often used as an all-encompassing term that covers AR, VR and MR – meaning Samsung hasn’t given too much away by telling us it’s working on new technology. Expect the leaks and rumors to continue.