Building Portable VR and AR Applications using OpenXR and Vulkan

Date: Wednesday, September 4, 11:20 - 12:20
Speakers:
Neil Trevett, President of The Khronos Group Inc
Eisaku Ohbuchi, Director and Fellow, DMP
Location: Room 502, Pacifico Yokohama

See the Day 1 schedule (in Japanese)

The recently released OpenXR 0.90 provisional release from the Khronos Group specifies a cross-platform Application Programming Interface (API) enabling XR hardware platform vendors to expose the functionality of their runtime systems. By accessing a common set of objects and functions corresponding to application lifecycle, rendering, tracking, frame timing, and input, which are frustratingly different across existing vendor-specific APIs, software developers can run their applications across multiple XR systems with minimal porting effort—significantly reducing industry fragmentation.

The Khronos OpenXR working group was formed in early 2017 with the support and participation of leading XR companies. Throughout the development of the specification, multiple Khronos members have been developing independent implementations to ensure a robust and complete specification. Many of these implementations are becoming available for developers to evaluate including the ‘Monado’ OpenXR open source implementation from Collabora and the OpenXR runtime for Windows Mixed Reality headsets from Microsoft shipping today. Additionally, the Unreal Engine from Epic plans to continue to support OpenXR.

The OpenXR 0.90 provisional specification can be found on the Khronos website and is released in provisional form to enable developers and implementers to provide feedback at the OpenXR forum.

OpenXR is used together with a high-performance 3D API such as Vulkan or DX12. This session will illustrate both the essential architecture of OpenXR for developers and show how Vulkan has evolved capabilities to support high-performance, low-latency XR applications. This will enable developers to start using OpenXR effectively and provide feedback to Khronos to influence how the standard evolves.