Recently, HTC Vive, one of the OpenXR support vendors, announced the launch of the OpenXR public beta plan for its all-in-one VR device Vive Focus 3.
It is understood that OpenXR was developed and released by the Khronos Group, a non-profit industry alliance focused on open standard API APIs, to standardize XR hardware and software communication methods and help develop high-performance AR/VR applications that support multiple platforms.
It is reported that the latest OpenXR standard specification version 1.0 was launched in 2019, although the adoption is slow, but has been growing steadily. Currently, Meta, Sony, Valve, Microsoft, HTC, NVIDIA, and AMD have successively supported the standard (Apple does not currently support it). Meta also incorporated OpenXR compatibility support into the basic requirements for the newly released Quest App in July 2021.
OpenXR promises to allow developers to build applications that run on any headset without having to integrate a proprietary SDK to specifically add support. Although developers still need to compile separate versions for different operating systems, all standalone VR headsets are currently android, so there is no additional burden.
For HTC to launch openXR public tests for Vive Focus 3, this means that developers can more easily port vr apps that already support the OpenXR standard to the Vive Focus 3 platform, although these developers are currently mainly concentrated on the Meta Quest platform.
Meta also deprecated its proprietary Oculus SDK last year to support OpenXR, so Vive Focus 3 will make it easier to port Quest applications after supporting OpenXR. But even with OpenXR support, there are still barriers for developers to publish VR applications to other stores, and platform-level APIs such as friend invitations, meetups, leaderboards, cloud saves, and avatars are still different, resulting in more complicated work than expected in porting.