On April 8, Google debuted its latest virtual reality platform, Android XR, live on the TED 2025 main stage in Vancouver, Canada.
In a TED Talk, Shahram Izadi — head of augmented reality and extended reality at Google — said that the device came at the heels of a career dedicated almost entirely to augmented reality.
“Augmented reality and virtual reality has moved computing from the rectangular screen, to the 360 immersive display, to now even the world itself becoming the display,” Izadi told the assembled crowd. “We now refer to this broad collection of experiences as extended reality, or XR.”
Using AI and XR, Izadi and his team created the operating system Android XR, which can be worn as a heavier headset or “ordinary looking glasses.”
Izadi welcomed his colleague Nishtha up on stage to show off the virtual reality glasses.
To start, she had Gemini — Google’s AI assistant — write a haiku for the TED crowd before her.
But Izadi admitted that AI seeing, hearing, and responding in real time was pretty rudimentary. So he decided to “step it up a notch” by showing off a tool called Memory.
“For a rolling contextual window, the AI remembers what you see, without having to be told what to keep track of,” Izadi said.
“I keep losing my hotel key card,” Nishtha said, prompting Gemini. “Do you know where I last left the card?’
“The hotel key card is to the left of the music record,” Gemini responded, referencing the objects on the shelf behind her.
“For someone as forgetful as me, that’s a killer app,” Izadi joked.
Perhaps most impressive is the device’s ability to detect, translate, and transcribe languages in real time into pop-up subtitles.
“You all may have seen translation demos like this before, but what’s new now is that in addition to [Gemini] saying things in a different language, I can also speak to Gemini in a different language,” Nishtha said, speaking to Gemini in Hindi and getting a response in real time.
Next, Izadi brought out his colleague Max to test the same operating system on Samsung’s Project Moohan XR Headset.
With the “more immersive” headwear, the Google team explored Cape Town, South Africa, through a bird’s-eye view, looming over a detailed map as Gemini gave insights about a local town.
Then they switched over to a snowboarding video and asked Gemini to estimate the location of the slope by the crest of mountains in the background.
They finished off by toggling over to Stardew Valley, as Gemini offered advice for playing the video game.
In the full TED Talk, which will likely be released online in the coming year, Izadi and his colleagues showed off the system’s ability to seamlessly switch between virtual reality and present reality in demos that resembled something straight out of a superhero movie.
It’s a sentiment that journalist Victoria Song echoed when she had a chance to demo an early version of the platform in December.
“I felt as close to Tony Stark in a controlled demo as I’ll ever be,” Song wrote for The Verge, adding that Gemini felt her “Jarvis.”
“I’ve tried dozens of headsets and smart glasses that promised to make what I see in the movies real — and utterly failed,” she continued.
“For the first time, I experienced something relatively close.”
Izadi teased that this was just a small sliver of what Android XR had to offer, including watching films on a “virtual big screen,” reliving memories in 3-D with Google Photos, and using “Circle to Search” to get information on something directly in front of you.
“Glasses with Android XR will put the power of Gemini one tap away, providing helpful information right when you need it — like directions, translations, or message summaries without reaching for your phone. It’s all within your line of sight, or directly in your ear,” Izadi wrote in a press release in December.
Although the exact release date for Android XR has yet to be announced, it has been slated for 2025.
Header image courtesy of Gilberto Tadday / TED
