OpenXR is an incredibly supported idea which wants to streamline AR and VR advancement crosswise headsets and platforms. The amazing initiative has arrived at a milestone on July the 29th: its 1.0 launch.
The Khronos Group has observed and facilitated the development of the streamline by a community of several renown people in the AR/VR field.
OpenXR is a free standard that intends to bring together the VR and AR hardware, game engines, and various content, thus enabling a more compatible ecosystem. This idea has been worked on since April 2017, and it is currently supported by basically every main hardware, platform, and engine company in the VR area, and AR players such as Magic Leap.
The standard has both an application and a device interface. Building apps, platforms, and headsets which usually target the OpenXR standard, rather than a plethora of owned interfaces, makes for a considerably more compatible ecosystem.
OpenXR does not mean that apps and content from a platform will function with a headset from another. Every company still has control over the place where their content is made accessible, and which platform enables which headsets. In other words, OpenXR is a technical basis for interoperability, but business judgments still mandate content, device, and platform approach.
OpenXR 1.0 is now accessible on GitHub. Khronos Group has also released a reference guide which offers a high-technical summary of the API’s structure. The next step for headset, engine, and content creators is to launch applications which support OpenXR.
Microsoft has already released support for OpenXR on HoloLens 2 and Windows VR headsets. Also, Collabora has launched its Monado open-source Linux OpenXR runtime, and Epic stated that it has initially implemented OpenXR 0.9 support in Unreal Engine. Epic also shared the fact that it plans to update the engine for the 1.0 release of OpenXR.
Lastly, Oculus has promised to bring OpenXR runtime support to both its Rift and Quest sometime this year.
Juana loves to cover the tech and gaming industry, she always stays on the first row of CES conference and reports live from there.
