LOS ANGELES — The Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, announces the ratification and public release of the OpenXR 1.0 specification together with publicly available implementations and substantial ecosystem momentum. OpenXR is a unifying, royalty-free, open standard that provides high-performance, cross-platform access to virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) — collectively known as XR — platforms and devices. The new specification can be found on the Khronos Website (https://www.khronos.org/openxr).
“The working group is excited to launch the 1.0 version of the OpenXR specification, and the feedback from the community on the provisional specification released in March has been invaluable to getting us to this significant milestone,” says Brent Insko, OpenXR working group chair and lead XR architect at Intel. “Our work continues as we now finalize a comprehensive test suite, integrate key game engine support, and plan the next set of features to evolve a truly vibrant, cross-platform standard for XR platforms and devices. Now is the time for software developers to start putting OpenXR to work.”
After gathering feedback from the XR community during the public review of the provisional specification, improvements were made to the OpenXR input subsystem, game engine editor support, and loader. With this 1.0 release, the working group will evolve the standard while maintaining full backwards compatibility from this point onward, giving software developers and hardware vendors a solid foundation upon which to deliver incredible, portable user experiences.
Together with this release, the OpenXR standard is receiving continued ecosystem support from Khronos member companies. OpenXR implementations from members are shipping this week, including the ‘Monado’ OpenXR open source implementation from Collabora, the OpenXR runtime for Windows Mixed Reality headsets from Microsoft, as well as an OpenXR implementation from Oculus. Epic Games plans to release OpenXR 1.0 support in Unreal Engine with this specification ratification.
At SIGGRAPH 2019, OpenXR members Epic Games, Microsoft and Varjo will demonstrate cross-platform XR applications within the same OpenXR API, showing how OpenXR 1.0 helps to reduce industry fragmentation. The demonstrations will take place during the OpenXR Birds of a Feather presentation at 1:00pm on July 31st.