
Google shocked the industry this week when it announced that it was investing $250 million into Android XR by bringing on talented HTC Vive engineers to bolster the fledgling operating system. HTC's Vive team helped pave the way for modern VR headsets when they co-developed the original Vive headset with Valve 2016, and now the company's engineers look to be doing something similar for Android XR.
This comes just a day after Samsung finally showed off its upcoming XR headset — currently called Project Moohan — at Samsung Unpacked 2025 alongside the Galaxy S25 unveiling. While there's no reason to think Google is making a Pixel VR headset just yet, the move to bring on engineers from HTC mirrors what Google did to evolve the Pixel in 2017.