The Open Standard Initiative
Today the Khronos Group announced a new open standard initiative for VR. The goal is to allow VR hardware and software to talk to each other without the need to go through anybody’s proprietary API.
As the number of competing VR systems grows, this effort will provide a stable platform for application developers to target. And as new VR headset manufacturers come online, the same standard will give them access to a broad set of applications without the need to convince anyone to port those applications to the new piece of hardware.
This new standard is the next logical step from what we’ve been working on with OpenVR. The VR team at Valve is hard at work with the rest of the VR standard group at Khronos to define these APIs. Over time we expect significant pieces of OpenVR itself to be replaced by the Khronos APIs.
If you work on VR hardware or engines, we invite you to join us and work on the standard through Khronos. You can find information about joining them on their site.
Industry Support
- Daryl Sartain, director and worldwide head of VR at AMD
- Jakub Lamik, VP Product Marketing, Media Processing Group, ARM
- Tim Sweeney, founder & CEO, Epic Games
- Mike Jazayeri, director product management, Google VR
- Kim Pallister, director of the VR Center of Excellence at Intel
- …and many more
What is the Khronos Group?
This group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics, vision and neural nets on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include Vulkan™, OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenGL® SC, WebGL™, SPIR-V™, OpenCL™, SYCL™, OpenVX™, NNEF™, COLLADA™, 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.
