Khronos To Develop New Standard For VR

The Khronos Group is going public this morning with a call for participation of companies that are not yet Khronos members but looking to join a new initiative: developing a new, cross-vendor VR standard to allow for better virtual reality interoperability of hardware devices, game engines, and more.

The Khronos Virtual Reality Standard Initiative is looking to allow for an industry standard for VR to allow for more portable VR applications and engines that would target the standard APIs that in turn would be supported by all the major VR device vendors. This would hopefully provide for more unity compared to the competing standards right now of Steam VR, Oculus, Gear GR, OSVR, Daydream, etc.

This new VR standard will try to be all-encompassing, "Khronos’ VR standard will include cross-platform APIs for tracking headsets, controllers and other objects, and rendering to a diverse set of display hardware." Valve is contributing OpenVR to this new working group's initiative while other industry members are expected to contribute too.

This working group will be open to existing Khronos members and participation from any new members that may want to join, Razer joining Khronos is one of the new members for this VR work.

This Khronos standard for VR will not come overnight but is likely at least 12~18+ months out, depending upon the pace of the working group and other factors. A schedule for the standard will come once the scope for this VR standard has been firmed up.

With many vendors already backing this initiative like Valve, AMD, Oculus, Google, Intel, LunarG, NVIDIA, and others, hopefully it will get off the ground in no time. Khronos should be publishing more details on this new VR initiative today at Khronos.org.