Samsung showed the XR SDK at the 2018 Developers Conference. While Microsoft has generally presented their reality technologies as being along a spectrum (ranging from completely enveloping the user to only placing overlays on the real world) it has always been something that has involved a head mounted device. Samsung presents AR as something that is either viewed through a head mounted device or something that a person views through a portable hand held window into another world.  The language used by various companies varies a bit. Microsoft calls the their range of technologies “mixed reality.” Samsung calls theirs SXR which stands for Samsung Extended Reality.

It was several years ago that Samsung first showed it’s take on VR with the release of the Note 4 and the developer’s edition GearVR. The GearVR is now available as a consumer product, but Samsung took an economical approach to initial hardware for head mounted augmented reality. Instead of creating custom hardware they took some off the shelf products and mixed them together to make an economical headset.

The Samsung XR SDK is almost a super set of the the GearVR SDK. I say “almost” because with a proper super set you would find all the same class names that you would expect from the GearVR SDK. In the Samsung XR SDK the classes exists within a new namespace and have been renamed. GearVR programs could be ported over with some changes to the class names being invoked.

In development is an API standard for AR/VR experiences named OpenXR. Once the standard is defined and released Samsung plans for their XR SDK to be an implementation of this standard.

While the GearVR SDK was specifically for Samsung devices and the Samsung headset the Samsung XR SDK will run on non-Samsung devices for through-the-window AR but will run on the Oculus GO and Samsung devices for stereoscopic experiences.