Khronos Releases OpenXR 1.0 Specification

LOS ANGELES, CA (SIGGRAPH), July 30, 2019 – 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 and via GitHub.

“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,” said 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 the specification release, OpenXR 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, an Oculus OpenXR implementation for Rift, as well as Oculus Quest support coming upon ratification of OpenXR 1.0. Epic Games also plans to release OpenXR 1.0 support in Unreal Engine.

At SIGGRAPH 2019, OpenXR members Epic Games, Microsoft and Varjo will demonstrate XR applications targeting distinct VR and AR platforms, all while using the same OpenXR API, demonstrating how the standard reduces industry fragmentation through application portability. The demonstrations will take place during the OpenXR Birds of a Feather (BOF) presentation at 1:00 p.m. on July 31, as well as during the Khronos Networking Reception taking place at 5:30 p.m. on July 31. No passes are required for either event and all are welcome to attend.

About the Khronos Group

The Khronos Group is an open industry consortium of over 140 leading hardware and software companies creating advanced, royalty-free, acceleration standards for 3D graphics, augmented and virtual reality, vision and machine learning. Khronos standards include Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenGL SC, WebGL, SPIR-V, OpenCL, SYCL, OpenVX, NNEF, COLLADA, OpenXR, 3D Commerce, and glTF. Khronos members are enabled to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge accelerated platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *