March 18, 2019 – The Khronos Group, an open consortium of hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, has today announced the ratification and public release of the OpenXR version 0.90 provisional specification.
OpenXR is a unifying, royalty-free, open standard that provides access to augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) – collectively known as extended reality (XR) – platforms and devices.
The OpenXR 0.90 provisional release specifies a cross-platform Application Programming Interface (API) enabling XR hardware platform vendors to expose the functionality of their runtime systems. By accessing a common set of objects and functions corresponding to application lifecycle, rendering, tracking, frame timing, and input, which are different across existing vendor-specific APIs, software developers can run their applications across multiple XR systems with minimal porting effort, something that the Khronos Group has said will significantly reduce industry fragmentation.
The Khronos OpenXR working group was formed in early 2017 with the support and participation of leading XR companies. Throughout the development of the specification, multiple Khronos members have been developing independent implementations to ensure a robust and complete specification. Many of these implementations are becoming available for developers to evaluate including the ‘Monado’ OpenXR open source implementation from Collabora and the OpenXR runtime for Windows Mixed Reality headsets from Microsoft. Additionally, the Unreal Engine plans to continue to support OpenXR.
“OpenXR seeks to simplify AR/VR software development, enabling applications to reach a wider array of hardware platforms without having to port or re-write their code and subsequently allowing platform vendors supporting OpenXR access to more applications,” said Brent Insko, Lead VR Architect at Intel and OpenXR Working Group Chair. “The OpenXR provisional specification – together with the runtimes publicly available at launch and coming in the next few weeks – will enable hands-on, cross-platform testing by application and engine developers. The working group welcomes developer feedback to ensure an OpenXR 1.0 specification that truly meets the needs of the XR industry.”
Several industry key players have voiced support for OpenXR provisional 0.90:
“Facebook and Oculus continue to believe in the value the OpenXR standard delivers to users and developers. We plan to provide runtime support for apps built on OpenXR 1.0 on the Rift and Quest platforms later this year,” said Nate Mitchell, Oculus Co-founder and Head of VR Product, Facebook.
“HTC VIVE is committed to creating a viable ecosystem for the XR industry which is why we are proud to support OpenXR,” said Vinay Narayan, Vice President, Platform Strategy at HTC. “Bringing the community together to help define standards and best practices, allows all of us to move forward, together.”
“Microsoft believes that for mixed reality to thrive, it must be open for everyone: open stores, open browsers and open developer platforms. We were proud to demo our OpenXR runtime at SIGGRAPH last year, and we’re dedicated to supporting the launch of OpenXR this year on Windows Mixed Reality and HoloLens 2,” said Alex Kipman, Technical Fellow at Microsoft. “To help developers provide feedback on the provisional OpenXR spec, we’re releasing today a developer preview of our OpenXR runtime with support for Windows Mixed Reality headsets.”
“The next key enabler to drive the XR ecosystem will be OpenXR: an open, broadly supported API standard for cross-device compatible applications. It will build on the impressive progress in the XR field over the last few years, including multiple great HMDs and powerful VR-specific GPU features,” said David Weinstein, Director of Virtual Reality at NVIDIA.
“It is significant when so many key players in the industry come together to create an open standard like OpenXR. We look forward to seeing adoption of the new standard, and believe that reducing barriers for cross-platform XR applications accelerates growth, innovation, and diversity in the VR and AR industry,” said Nandan Nayampally, Vice President and General Manager, Client Line of Business, Arm.
“Being dedicated to royalty-free open standards and open source technologies, Collabora is proud to be one of the major contributors of the OpenXR working group and its first release today. In addition to this milestone, Collabora is excited to announce Monado, an open source implementation of the newly released OpenXR spec.” said Philippe Kalaf, CEO at Collabora.
Tim Sweeney, Founder and CEO of Epic Games, said: “Epic believes that open standards like OpenXR are essential foundations for a vibrant, multi-platform VR and AR industry in the coming years. We’ve supported OpenXR since its inception, including powering the first public demo of OpenXR at SIGGRAPH last year, and hope to see the ecosystem continue to grow with the first public release of the spec at GDC”. He added, “Epic plans to continue supporting OpenXR in Unreal Engine 4.”
“Tobii has been part of the OpenXR initiative for years and is committed to this effort,” said Henrik Eskilsson, CEO of Tobii. “We believe that an open standard, multi-platform API holds great promise to enable developers to introduce eye tracking in a uniform and predictable way for XR applications. OpenXR will reduce the complexity of supporting multiple platforms and devices, and let developers spend more time creating amazing content.”
“Unity is committed to being an open and accessible platform and we remain supportive of open standards for XR applications and devices,” said Ralph Hauwert, Vice President of Platforms at Unity Technologies. “To that end, we’re excited about OpenXR and believe this is a significant step towards a more open ecosystem.”
“At Varjo we’re pushing professional virtual reality to a level that is truly useful for enterprises with the highest possible visual fidelity. For that we need standards that make it easier for companies to interoperate with the best technologies,” said Rémi Arnaud, Principal Architect at Varjo. “Varjo is committed to support OpenXR.”
Image credit: Khronos Group
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About the author
Sam is the Founder and Managing Editor of Auganix. With a background in research and report writing, he has been covering XR industry news for the past seven years.