Beaverton, OR – April 15, 2024 – Today, The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announces the immediate availability of the OpenXR™ 1.1 specification. This release evolves the widely adopted OpenXR open API standard for high-performance, cross-platform access to VR, AR, and mixed reality (MR) — collectively known as XR—platforms and devices. OpenXR 1.1 consolidates widely used API extensions into the core specification to reduce fragmentation and adds new functionality to streamline the development of more powerful and efficient XR applications.
In particular, OpenXR 1.1 consolidates multiple vendor extensions for key functionality to reduce differences in application code across multiple platforms, while still remaining flexible and extensible to foster innovation in a rapidly growing and evolving market. The OpenXR Working Group will focus on managing a pipeline of extensions to develop and seek feedback on new functionality, while proactively integrating proven technology into the core specification to provide developers with robust cross-platform XR capabilities.
“NVIDIA regards OpenXR as a key open standard as it enables portable access to diverse XR devices. OpenXR 1.1 is an important step in consolidating important functionality while reducing fragmentation for developers. NVIDIA is working to leverage OpenXR in its CloudXR Suite that enables flexible delivery of sophisticated immersive experiences to a broad range of devices,” said David Chu, vice president of Spatial Computing and XR, NVIDIA.
Today, most major XR platforms have transitioned to using OpenXR to expose current and future device capabilities. Vendors with conformant OpenXR implementations include Acer, ByteDance, Canon, HTC, Magic Leap, Meta, Microsoft, Sony, XREAL, Qualcomm, Valve, Varjo, and Collabora’s Monado open source runtime. OpenXR is also supported by all the major game and rendering engines, including Autodesk VRED, Blender, Godot, NVIDIA’s Omniverse, StereoKit, Unreal Engine, and Unity.
The OpenXR 1.1 specification can be found on the Khronos website and on GitHub OpenXR Registry
OpenXR Roadmap and Call for Community Feedback
The OpenXR Working Group welcomes and encourages feedback from the XR developer community on their experience with using OpenXR. Such feedback is essential input to prioritizing future developments on the OpenXR roadmap so that the evolving real-world requirements of developers are met. For example, the Working Group is currently exploring multiple functionality domains such as extending hand tracking to include full body tracking, and enhanced handling of spatial entities to provide standardized methods to interact with the user’s environment in advanced spatial computing applications.
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