In this blog, Alfredo reflects on OpenXR development within Khronos over the last 12 months, including updates to the specification, the release of multiple extensions to support the latest XR developments, plus an evolving suite of tools that has kept OpenXR at the forefront of cross-platform XR innovation. Alfredo will also provide a glimpse of what the XR community can look forward to in 2024.

To the OpenXR Community,

As we round out the first quarter of 2024, it's remarkable to reflect on the enduring impact of the pandemic and celebrate the resilience of the XR industry despite it. The return to OpenXR Face-to-Face meetings in October 2022 marked a pivotal moment, especially for me as the newly elected OpenXR Working Group Chair. This first meeting brought together around 50 Working Group members, all of whom were eager to exchange ideas and insights. The renewed energy and focus set the stage for what was to come. 

Our journey from that point has been nothing short of transformative.The dedication and collaborative spirit of the Working Group members, Khronos staff, and the OpenXR community has been instrumental in our progress. In 2023, we saw a remarkable increase in our output, with about 260 new issues and 940 commits to the main OpenXR specification repository. 

This signifies a nearly 50 percent increase in productivity compared to 2022. Moreover, the adoption of OpenXR has almost doubled, expanding our reach from 7 to 13 companies. Acer, ByteDance, Canon, Magic Leap, Sony, and XREAL are all now integrating OpenXR into their products, ensuring that applications built with OpenXR will be compatible with their hardware. Seeing this adoption blossom has been a testament to OpenXR's influence and relevance to the industry.

It’s Not All About Specifications: Ongoing OpenXR Projects

The Working Group is proactively channeling its ecosystem development resources to drive technical innovation, improve cross-platform portability, and make it easier for developers to get started with OpenXR. In 2023 we significantly expanded our activities to include four significant projects:

1. Conformance Test Suite: First launched in 2020, the OpenXR Conformance Test Suite (CTS) plays a critical role in maintaining the integrity of the specification. By developing new tests, we ensure consistent application behavior across diverse hardware platforms, simplifying the application development process.
2. Monado Upgrade Project: This is another pivotal endeavor, with the goal of enhancing the Monado open-source OpenXR runtime to help manufacturers expedite their own OpenXR developments.
3. Input Rebinding: We're also making great strides with the Input Rebinding Infrastructure, a project dedicated to standardizing interaction rebinding at the runtime level across different devices and applications. This effort is critical for creating a more unified and user-friendly experience in the XR environment.
4. OpenXR Tutorials: We've launched the Tutorials Project in response to popular demand for resources to help developers get started with OpenXR. This initiative provides developers with an accessible and comprehensive introduction to OpenXR, making it easier for newcomers to enter and thrive in this exciting field.   

Stay tuned for additional updates: we anticipate the launch of an exciting fifth project during Q1 2024.

Regular Specification Updates

Our release pipeline of specification updates has seen significant enhancements, bringing more efficiency and consistency to our workflow. We now celebrate a milestone each month with a OpenXR patch release accompanied by a corresponding CTS patch release. These updates on a regular cadence have been instrumental in garnering increased support and dedicated resources for OpenXR from decision-makers across multiple companies. 

Future Direction

Since the launch of OpenXR 1.0 in July 2019, a significant amount of work has been done to enhance the specification, develop new extensions and build the wider ecosystem. We are now diligently working toward the next release of the core OpenXR Specification, where we expect to integrate a number of existing extensions and updates. This is a major step towards reducing fragmentation between OpenXR runtimes. No specific release date has yet been set, but we are targeting the spring of 2024. 

Work on the next core specification release has been a period of active engagement and collaboration with the community, and we've been helped along the way by numerous developers who have shared their experiences and challenges in porting their apps by presenting to the group, raising issues and comments on our GitHub repository, or adding to the discussions in the OpenXR forums. Their invaluable feedback has helped us compile a comprehensive list of requirements to align OpenXR with, and even surpass, the capabilities of legacy APIs like OpenVR and Oculus Mobile SDK.

Of course, our work is never done.The next version of OpenXR is unlikely to encapsulate every feature we would like in a core specification, but it will mark the next step in creating a robust and dynamic OpenXR platform for cross-platform XR and mixed-reality development. We are excited about the future, which promises more substantial patch releases and major releases, brimming with innovative features and advancements to the core specification.This progress will not only enrich the OpenXR platform, but also empower developers and companies across the XR ecosystem.

We know you have questions. We’ve answered some of the most-asked questions about the OpenXR standardization process in a new OpenXR FAQ in an effort to provide transparency and information to the OpenXR community. 

As always, we welcome your feedback, comments, and questions on the OpenXR Discord, OpenXR Forums, or Issue Tracker. If you are developing OpenXR-related resources – let us know! If you want to participate directly in the development of the OpenXR standard, you are warmly invited to join Khronos and become a member of the OpenXR Working Group. Please visit our Membership page to learn more. 

A big thanks to everyone involved for making 2023 a slam dunk year for OpenXR!