Over the past year or so we’ve spoken a lot about the advances in Virtual Reality technology and content and the direction they might take in the future. What we haven’t really looked at is the lack of standardisation across the industry as a whole and what this means. With everyone building and optimizing for different platforms, devices, APIs and numerous other variables, the rapid pace of uptake can actually inhibit real progress by adding confusion and making it difficult to see the way forward. Not only that, but it can prevent the industry from becoming financially viable, restricting economies of scale that are vital for an industry to succeed, by making it almost impossible to create content that will work across a range of platforms and devices. This means developers are having to spend valuable time and effort in order to integrate with a wider range of hardware.
With this in mind, key industry parties are pushing for standardization, and we’ve teamed up with them through Khronos as part of the OpenXR Working Group to change things for the better. Alongside some of our major partners like Samsung, Mediatek and Huawei are ecosystem players like Oculus, Valve, Epic and Unity, ensuring expertise is accessible and knowledge is shared from all areas of the industry. This allows us to build a well-rounded view of the needs and requirements as well as the best solution for all parties.
The X in OpenXR is intentionally ambiguous. This is because, while the group are currently focused on VR for a first release, they also expect to address the emerging augmented and mixed reality mediums longer term. The group are working to create an open, royalty free API specification for applications to talk to any VR app, regardless of platform. This will allow more development time to be spent on creating awesome, immersive content rather than wasting it on trying to target as many end user devices or content types as possible. It won’t just help developers though, hardware manufacturers will have a much broader audience if they can feature content from a wider base and the use of a standard for core functionality will accelerate their ability to bring new products to market. This will consequently allow them to invest more in the hardware knowing quality content will be there to support and sustain it.
Arm is engaging with this standardisation effort as we are keen to help the various XR markets to grow and achieve their full potential. Standardisation of the application interface is widely recognised as a necessary step across the industry. In its first release the OpenXR standard will allow Arm partners to bring high quality VR devices to market and enable the scale that is required to create a viable market for VR content.
The new specification will interact with the vast majority of graphics APIs, including Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenGL ES, DirectX, and Metal, meaning no one is excluded and everyone has the opportunity to help build this exciting industry. This standardisation allows flexibility for multiple level of differentiation for our partners to create unique devices and experiences without working in silo and limiting themselves to a small, niche segment.