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Unifying Reality

OpenXR is a royalty-free, open standard that provides high-performance access to Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)—collectively known as XR—platforms and devices.

OpenXR Reaching for the Moon

“OpenXR is the glue of the XR industry! Manufactures now have a specification they can follow to ensure their system is compatible with past, present, and future XR applications. Application developers no longer need to worry about target platforms as OpenXR ensures the app will behave similarly on all conformant devices. Consumers can now choose their preferred headset instead of deciding based on compatibility with their favorite app.”

Help Us Build the OpenXR Ecosystem!

The OpenXR 1.0 specification is free for anyone to download, review and comment – please give us feedback on the specification and implementations on 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 join Khronos and become a member of the OpenXR Working Group, please visit our Membership page.

Solving XR fragmentation

Without a cross-platform standard, VR and AR applications and engines must use each platform’s proprietary APIs. New input devices need customized driver integration.

Graphic showing fragmentation before OpenXR

OpenXR provides cross-platform, high-performance access directly into diverse XR device runtimes across multiple platforms. OpenXR enables applications and engines, including WebXR, to run on any system that exposes the OpenXR APIs.

Graphic showing landscape after OpenXR

Companies Supporting OpenXR

Company logos supporting OpenXR

Industry Quotes

“The Working Group has put tremendous effort into OpenXR conformance testing to create a truly reliable cross-platform API. We encourage OpenXR implementers to use the tests in their own development and consider contributing additional tests to help further reduce cross-vendor variability. With the release of the conformance tests and official launch of the Adopters Program, widening availability of OpenXR across diverse devices, and expanding use in large open source projects, OpenXR is now ready for the next wave of adoption and deployment.”

“OpenXR 1.0 release is a huge milestone and AMD is proud to have been a member in its creation. The expanding XR industry and ecosystem continues to be a key focus for AMD and we are excited by the potential for market growth that OpenXR 1.0 enables. As always, AMD is a proponent of open industry standards.”

Daryl Sartain
Director of XR, AMD

“The latest release of the OpenXR 1.0 API conformance test suite is a significant step towards enabling XR content creation across multiple platforms on the same code base, allowing developers to focus more on their creative vision. At the same time, this release further advances Arm’s performance optimization efforts in computer vision, machine learning, and graphics workloads on Arm-based solutions, enabling more immersive experiences on the untethered and lightweight head mounted devices of the future.”

“This is another milestone for OpenXR, and Collabora is proud to have contributed to the development of the OpenXR specification as well as the open source conformance test suite. The Monado open source XR runtime project founded by Collabora is quickly approaching conformance. As specification editor, I commend the working group on their dedication to publishing and maintaining a high-quality standard and a comprehensive test suite. The suite is designed to ensure conformance to the specification and uniform application behavior across runtimes and environments, so the industry can deliver on the OpenXR promise of unifying reality.”

“OpenXR 1.0 steers us toward an alignment of many crucial emerging interface platforms. CTRL-labs is excited to contribute to this crucial step forward and to give developers the tools they need to explore neural interfaces.”

“As supporters of OpenXR since its inception, Epic’s Unreal Engine team is thrilled to see the launch of the Adopter’s Program, which we believe will increase adoption of OpenXR among creators and build trust with consumers.”

“Facebook and Oculus continue to believe in the value the OpenXR standard delivers to users and developers. We plan to provide runtime support for apps built on OpenXR 1.0 on the Rift and Quest platforms.”

“WebXR relies on APIs like OpenXR to provide the communication layer between browsers and virtual reality or augmented reality devices. The Immersive Web Working Group is excited for OpenXR support to become widely available because it has the potential to reduce the development and maintenance burden for WebXR implementers while increasing the range of supported hardware.”

“Holochip develops AR flight training and simulation technology for the U.S. military and is incorporating XR capabilities into existing NAVAIR training environments. The OpenXR 1.0 spec will enable wide adoption of conformant OpenXR-enabled devices. The OpenXR spec paves the way for military simulation environments to benefit from the technical advances in the commercial XR market. These advances will lead to greater effectiveness and cost savings of training and improve the ability of warfighters to safely mitigate risks”

Robert Batchko
CEO, Holochip Corporation

“From the earliest days of VIVE, we’ve set out to keep the platform open for developers and their content, and we believe OpenXR’s work is important for the entire XR community. We’re committed to enabling the developer community to build the content and applications that power experiences across the spectrum of reality. This is a big step in the right direction for the XR industry.”

“Khronos has done it again, bringing divergent industry organizations, technologies, and ambitions to a common ground that benefits all parties. OpenXR will not just save VR and AR—it will provide the launching pad to make all the promises, dreams, and potential be realized. An extraordinary body of work, the members are to be congratulated for their tireless effort. The industry is in your debt.

Dr. Jon Peddie
Jon Peddie Research

“The time to embrace OpenXR is now. In the year since the industry came together to publish the OpenXR 1.0 spec and demonstrated working bits at SIGGRAPH 2019, so much progress has happened. Seeing the core platforms in our industry getting behind the standard and shipping real, conformant implementations, as well as coming together to push the spec forward with cross-vendor extensions for critical features like hand tracking and eye tracking, is singularly awesome. As for the Mixed Reality platform we build at Microsoft, the base specification plus these extensions allow us to ship a conformant OpenXR 1.0 implementation to all Windows Mixed Reality and HoloLens 2 users that provides complete access to the functionality of the products. No compromise. And on the content side, the adoption of OpenXR in Minecraft’s desktop VR product further reinforces Microsoft’s commitment to the success of OpenXR.”

“Congratulations to the OpenXR team on this important 1.0 release. The flexible, extensible design of OpenXR 1.0 will support innovative, next-generation graphics technologies that accelerate XR applications and even enable new XR use-cases.”

“Pluto VR is proud to support these latest OpenXR milestones which strengthen the foundation of the whole industry. Extensions around hand and eye tracking are significant steps towards allowing people to more naturally interact with XR software and each other. We’re excited to continue working on extensions to push us all further into the future.”

Jared Cheshier
CTO, Pluto VR

“Qualcomm Technologies is committed to helping our customers and partners that leverage Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ XR platforms to achieve conformance on the OpenXR 1.0 Conformance Test Suite. This is an important milestone and validates industry-wide adoption of the OpenXR standard. The new OpenXR extensions for eye tracking and hand tracking are key in pushing the technology envelope forward and enabling immersive user experiences. We plan to continue to support runtimes built on OpenXR 1.0 and future extensions.”

“At Tobii, we are dedicated to lowering the barrier for developers to easily and reliably utilize eye tracking and enable more natural interactions in their applications. We believe this is an important step toward mainstream adoption of eye tracking technology in enterprise and consumer devices. The key extension announced today, which unlocks eye gaze interactions, formally establishes a critical foothold for eye tracking in the new and fast-emerging OpenXR ecosystem. With this milestone complete, we will continue to contribute to OpenXR with the goal to deliver even more eye tracking capabilities via future extensions.”

Denny Rönngren
Architect, Tobii

“With 10 years of hand tracking experience, Ultraleap is proud to feed into the definition of the hand tracking API as part of the latest OpenXR extensions, bringing the world’s best hand tracking to even more people. Since joining the working group in October 2019, it has been exciting to work alongside the members towards a common goal. What we do now will ensure end users benefit from the highest standards and performance in XR, accelerating global market adoption and industry growth.”

“Unity is committed to being an open and accessible platform and we remain supportive of open standards for XR applications and devices. To that end, we're excited about OpenXR and believe this is a significant step towards a more open ecosystem.”

“OpenXR is designed to enable VR content compatibility on as many devices as possible, giving developers the confidence of knowing they can focus on one build of their VR title and it will ‘just work’ across the entire PC VR ecosystem. This release is a huge step forward toward that goal, bringing support from two different implementations in the PC ecosystem. With these and more on the way, including our ongoing developer preview in SteamVR, now is the time for developers and engine vendors to start looking at OpenXR as the foundation for their upcoming content.”

Joe Ludwig
Programmer, Valve

“Varjo has been an early contributor to OpenXR with a live demo of our human-eye resolution VR/XR at SIGGRAPH 2019, as well as by providing a preview of the technology in its runtime since November 2019. The availability of the conformance test is an important milestone. Varjo looks forward to being able to deliver OpenXR conformant products in the near future, and we are proud to continue extending the standard to our customers who are some of the highest-end enterprise users in the XR space.”