He Google Play Store is your destination for apps that run on all types of Android hardware. It has smartphone apps, obviously, plenty of apps optimized for tablets and other large screens, as well as apps ready to run on your Use a smart watch with operating system. Today we’re looking at the possibility of Google expanding those categories to include an entirely new type of product, as we uncover evidence that the Play Store is working to support extended reality (XR) headsets.

XR, if you’re not familiar with the term, is a sort of umbrella label that covers everything from fully immersive virtual reality to augmented and mixed reality systems that combine real and virtual worlds. We know that Google and Samsung are interested in XR Hardwareso it would make quite a bit of sense to start seeing Android apps preparing to declare support for such devices.

Checking out version 43.3.32-31 of the Google Play Store app, we spotted the inclusion of a new icon that surely appears to represent an XR headset and a new text string that explicitly mentions “XR headset.”

While it’s not much at the moment, it seems reasonably obvious where this is headed, and we wouldn’t be at all surprised if Google has a new section of the Play Store ready to accompany the arrival of some of the elements of this next generation of Android. XR Powered Headphones.

Although many companies have already created headsets that take advantage of Android in one way or another, many of them have approached the software question in different ways; we only analyze a few Rokid glassesfor example, which are actually based on Android TV. And of course, we had Cardboard and Daydream for phone-based virtual reality, but that trend has largely died out. For manufacturers who want their new XR efforts to be taken seriously, Google taking XR apps seriously is the kind of sign they’ll want to see.

Right now, we’re just curious as to when we’ll get a chance to try out some of this hardware. CES is only a couple of months away…