The Khronos Group enters cooperation agreement with the Haptics Industry Forum to bring Haptics to the Metaverse

In Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality News

March 16, 2022 – The Khronos Group and the Haptics Industry Forum (HIF) have entered into a cooperative liaison agreement to foster synergy between the two organizations to encourage the integration of advanced haptics functionality into the Khronos OpenXR open standard for portable augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), to enable broad availability of haptics in the metaverse and beyond.

According to the Khronos Group, the agreement will see HIF and Khronos collaborate with a shared goal to enable broad, cross-platform access to next-generation haptic feedback in XR applications, enabling rich multisensory experiences to reach beyond 3D visuals for the eyes and spatial audio for the ears – and include expressive haptics for touch.

The Khronos Group is an open consortium of pioneering companies creating advanced standards in 3D, augmented and virtual reality (VR), and for the metaverse. Its OpenXR standard is a unifying, royalty-free, open standard that provides cross-platform access to virtual reality and augmented reality (collectively known as XR) platforms and devices. OpenXR enables software developers to reach a wider array of hardware platforms without having to port or re-write their code and provides platform vendors access to a growing number of OpenXR applications.

“The OpenXR Working Group looks forward to partnering with the HIF XR working group to define the APIs to enable next generation haptic feedback in XR applications enabling more immersive XR experiences,” said Brent Insko, lead XR architect at Intel and OpenXR working group chair.

The HIF XR Haptics working group brings together leading haptics expertise and works to ensure industry interoperability standards have well considered functionality and levels of abstraction to enable immersive applications to portably access a wide range of haptics hardware capabilities.

“This liaison creates an important bridge between two industry organizations that are at the heart of many of the technologies underlying the metaverse. HIF’s member companies are applying their haptics expertise to ensure Khronos’ OpenXR open standard for rich XR experiences on immersive platform is fully aligned with HIF recommended practices,” said Eric Vezzoli, chair of the HIF XR working group, CEO of Interhaptics and HIF board member.

The partnership will allow the OpenXR and XR Haptics working groups to exchange use cases and requirements to increase the profile of haptics within OpenXR, and to ensure that OpenXR is fully aligned with the needs of the haptics community.

“Khronos warmly welcomes working with The Haptics Industry Forum. Their deep expertise will help ensure first-class support for haptics in the OpenXR specification and accelerate the adoption of cutting-edge haptics capabilities in OpenXR-enabled platforms everywhere,” said Neil Trevett, Khronos president.

For more information on the Khronos Group and its open standards for XR, click here. To find out more about the Haptics Industry Forum and its recommended practices for haptics, click here.

Image credit: The Khronos Group / The Haptics Industry Forum

About the author

Sam Sprigg

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.