My first impressions of Samsung's Galaxy XR hardware were very good. The headset is gorgeous, light, made of quality materials, and seems to borrow the best design ideas from all the best VR headsets available. But something didn't quite feel right the first few times I wore it.
While the headset certainly shares design similarities with the Meta Quest Pro, I quickly realized that it can't be worn the exact same way. General discomfort, a narrow field of view, and even warning messages from the Android XR operating system about eye-tracking issues tipped me off to this. This couldn't possibly be the way it was meant to work, right?
While you can swap out the forehead pack with varying thickness levels, there's no way to angle the side arms for the head strap or to adjust the lens distance from your face with a wheel, the way the Meta Quest Pro worked. So I went back to step one to figure out what was wrong, and it turns out all I had to do was adjust how I put it on my head.
Getting the right angle
The left side of the above picture shows how I initially put the headset on. I started by aligning the forehead pad to the top of my forehead, then tightened the wheel on the back to ensure the headset didn't slip off. While this resulted in what I thought was geometrically correct, it turns out that the side arms shouldn't be perfectly straight horizontally.
When it's worn this way, the back padding not only doesn't correctly align with the shape of my skull, but also doesn't line the displays up with my eyes. Android XR kept telling me to move the headset down further, which was impossible since the forehead pad was already as low as it could go on my forehead.
To fix this, I changed things up by placing the front of the headset on my cheeks first, then pulling the back down onto my skull. This resulted in the front of the headset angling down ever so slightly. You can see the side-by-side in the picture below.
That was the first time I felt like the Galaxy XR fit perfectly. Suddenly, my view of the gorgeous micro-OLED displays behind the lenses felt complete. They took up a significant portion of my vision rather than the almost telescope-like feeling they had when I wore the headset the wrong way.
Not only that, but the pressure on my forehead was suddenly lifted, now evenly distributed across the back of my head. I also immediately stopped getting notifications from the OS about eye-tracking problems, and that fantastic eye-tracking navigation suddenly worked properly.
It was surprising that such a small change fixed so many problems at once, but I was glad I found it and can now properly use the Galaxy XR!
The Galaxy XR is an uber-comfortable mixed reality headset that combines the best Android apps with a brilliant, bespoke XR experience.
