VR feels like it's simultaneously moving fast and slow. It's been two years and four months since the leading PC VR headsets, the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, hit shelves. The leading high-end headset overall, PSVR, has only been around for one year and nine months. That's a significant amount of time for individual products, but just a blip in the context of the formation of a brand new ecosystem and medium. Looking forward to the next generation of VR, advancements in specs and experience are not the only improvement; the industry as a whole is becoming more cohesive, which will ultimately benefit everyone involved. Here's how. OpenXR API Standard OpenXR is an in-development standard that's open and royalty free. It's being developed by a consortium consisting of effectively every major player in the VR market, including chip makers, headset makers, game engines, publishers, and VR app stores. The standard is being developed under the Khronos Group, the organization behind a number of major graphics standards like OpenGL, WebGL, and Vulkan. [caption id="attachment_80639" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Public supporters of OpenXR. | Image courtesy Khronos Group[/caption] OpenXR aims to foster greater interoperability between major pieces of the VR ecosystem: apps, game engines, and headsets. The goal is to make it easier to 'write once and run anywhere', meaning reducing the redundancy and complexity for an app, game engine, or headset to support the multitude of options available on the market. The OpenXR project is building an 'Application Interface', which sits between VR apps and content platforms, and a 'Device Layer', which sits between the content platforms and individual VR headsets and devices. The idea is that the Application Interface and the Device Layer should be standardized so that everyone can design against a common target rather than needing to maintain individual support for many different platforms and devices. [caption id="attachment_59861" align="aligncenter" width="640"] OpenXR is a broadly supported initiative to create an industry standard method of interfacing between VR headsets and software. | Images courtesy Khronos Group[/caption] Hypothetically this means that a game supporting OpenXR that launches tomorrow could work with an OpenXR-supported headset that launches in five years, since both were built targeting the same Application Interface and Device Layer. Similarly, a OpenXR headset from one company could work with OpenXR controllers from another company, letting users use various devices together more easily. Similarly, if a new game engine wanted to offer support for VR, it needs only to target the OpenXR Application Interface to potentially work with every headset and VR platform that supports OpenXR. [irp posts="66553" name="Oculus Wants to Go big" On Opening Their Platform to Third-party Headsets, When the Time is Right"] This doesn't necessarily mean that every VR platform that supports OpenXR will support every headset that supports OpenXR (for instance, the HTC Vive on the Oculus Store), but it does mean that the technical capability is in place if platform stakeholders want to move to an open device approach. In total, this makes it easier for new players to jump into the VR market, whether that be with a game, a game engine, a content platform, or even a new headset or accessory. This benefits everyone in the market by creating more options for developers and customers, and fosters competition which leads to better products. [caption id="attachment_80640" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Image courtesy Khronos Group[/caption] In March this year, the OpenXR group announced its latest progress and did a deep dive into the technical scope of the OpenXR spec. While the group hasn't announced an official release of the standard, the latest timeline shows that they are nearing an initial release, which we expect could come by the end of the year. VirtualLink Connection Standard [caption id="attachment_80641" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Public supporters of the VirtualLink project[/caption] Most major tethered headsets today require two or three plugs on the end of the cable which need to be connected to the host PC, and they differ from one headset to the next. The Rift, for instance, has one HDMI plug and one USB plug. The Vive has one DisplayPort plug, one USB plug, and a separate power plug that needs to connect to a wall outlet.VirtualLink, backed by most of the major players in the VR industry, is a newly announced connection standard that aims to simplify headset plugs into a single, well specified connector. Based on USB-C, the VirtualLink connector offers four high-speed HBR3 DisplayPort lanes (which are “scalable for future needs”), a USB3.1 data channel for on-board cameras, and up to 27 watts of power. The standard is said to be “purpose-built for VR,” being optimized for latency and the needs of next-generation headsets. The new connector will not only simplify the connection on the end of the headset's cable, it will also make it easier for customers to understand if a given computer will support a certain headset, which eases the process of buying a VR Ready system. Whereas today you might think your system meets all the specifications for a VR headset, only to find that your USB ports don't actually support the speeds required for the headset, or you don't have the right HDMI spec, the VirtualLink standard means that both customers and headset makers can count on the connector to support a well specified set of capabilities. VirtualLink was just announced last month and is expected to debut with the next generation of GPUs and PC VR headsets; the former we could see by the end of the year. Continued on Page 2 Knuckles – An Important Step for Unified Input [caption id="attachment_79593" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Image courtesy Cloudhead Games[/caption] Valve's 'Knuckles' VR controllers are a total rethinking of the the 'wand' controllers that debuted with the HTC Vive. They support a slew of new capabilities, including individual finger tracking and a force sensor, allowing for natural gripping and even the ability to detect how hard the user is squeezing the controller. While the original Vive controllers had one large trackpad which also acted as a button, Knuckles introduces two face buttons and a thumbstick, alongside a much smaller trackpad. When it comes to input and control schemes, Knuckles is significantly more in line with Oculus Touch, which also features an easy to use grip, two face buttons, and a thumbstick. This normalization of input might seem minor, but it actually has major benefits for the VR market. [irp posts="79583" name="Exclusive: Cloudhead Games Goes In-depth with Knuckles EV2 & Predecessors"] Today the Rift and Vive controllers are so different that the same game will have two very different control schemes depending upon which controller is being used. For many games, this difference in input capabilities can have a major impact on how well the game plays. Because input is inextricably tied to game design (Modern FPS controls came into their own on PC only once 'mouselook' was bubbled to the surface, while it took the 'twin-stick controller' to really make FPS viable on consoles), and because it's a lot of work to support two different input schemes, PC VR developers often design their games for one controller over the other, while support for the other controller gets tacked on after the fact. This is seen perhaps clearest between Rift and Vive titles where 'grabbing' is involved. Oculus' Touch controllers have a 'grip trigger' which is easy to hold and makes for an easy and natural way to grab and release objects in the virtual world. The Vive controllers have grab buttons, but they aren't well placed for all hand sizes and are difficult to keep pressed continuously. This has led to the vast majority of Vive games either using the trigger for grabbing (instead of the grip buttons), and/or using a 'sticky grip' scheme where an object stays attached to the users hands until they press another button to drop the object. If developers want to meet the input expectations of players, they have to rethink the control scheme for each controller, which isn't always easy. For instance, Moss which was originally designed to be played with a twin stick gamepad on PSVR, and translatec pretty well to the Rift's Touch controllers since they have thumbsticks and face buttons. Porting the game's controls to the Vive proved challenging because the trackpad-focused controller design wasn't as suitable—something reviewers of the game critiqued—and the developers have had to continue to tweak the control scheme post-launch to make it more viable. Unifying VR controller capabilities and layouts means less work for developers, which leads to more players being able to experience games as they were meant to be played without controller differences standing in the way. This move could prove to be as important as the unification of Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo controllers, all of which now offer twin sticks, face buttons, bumpers, and triggers. Valve's Knuckles controllers have been in development for quite some time now, but the company recently revealed the latest development kit, the 'EV2', which is looking much closer to a consumer-ready product than previous iterations. Valve recently shipped the EV2 to "hundreds" of developers, signaling that mass production could be near on the horizon. Standalone Headsets While mobile VR headsets may not offer the same high-end experience as console and PC-based VR headsets do today, they're an important piece of the adoption puzzle thanks to their low cost and ease of use. The first generation of mobile VR was focused largely around 'smartphone shell' headsets like Gear VR, Google Cardboard, and Daydream View, which relied on a docked smartphone to power the headset. Now mobile VR appears to be giving way to 'standalone' mobile VR headsets: fully contained headsets that don't rely on a docked smartphone. [caption id="attachment_54113" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Early mobile VR headsets relied largely on docked smartphones. | Photo by Road to VR[/caption] While the smartphone shell approach was novel in that the headsets could be made cheaply since users are almost certain to already own the core the device (their smartphone), the design comprises compared to a standalone headset were many, including challenges around heat, battery life, and performance—and ultimately boiling down to convenience. The new wave of standalone mobile VR headsets—now available from major players like Oculus, Lenovo, and (in China) HTC—makes VR more accessible than ever, thanks to the headsets being dedicated to VR and ready to go at a moment's notice, without users needing to sacrifice the use of their phone (and its battery!). Standalone headsets are still finding their legs, especially in the content department, but clearly represent a transformation toward a new generation that's a better product-market fit than what came before. Continued on Page 3 Santa Cruz – Common Capabilities Between Mobile and Tethered VR [caption id="attachment_69590" align="aligncenter" width="640"] image courtesy Oculus[/caption] Oculus is working on what might be considered the first high-end standalone mobile VR headset, because it will be the first to offer high quality positional tracking for head and hands, which makes it much more similar to tethered headsets from a game design and feature standpoint than a headset like Oculus Go, which only offers a seated experience with limited tracking. This is important because—just like we talked about in the Knuckles section above—input capabilities are inextricably linked to content design. When you have headsets like the HTC Vive and the Oculus Go (which have very different capabilities) trying to design one application to fit both means designing for the lowest common denominator. At this point, the abilities of mobile VR compared to tethered VR are so different that most developers don't even try to design their games for both categories because the design scope would be unreasonably wide. Headsets like Santa Cruz, which will bring the defining elements of tethered VR (positionally tracked head and hands) to the mobile VR space, makes VR game design significantly more portable between mobile and tethered headsets. Great games like Beat Saber—which would need significant design alterations to be ported to a headset like Oculus Go—could be perfectly viable on Santa Cruz with little more than changes to the game's graphics (to account for the limited processing power of mobile headsets). As the capabilities of mobile VR headsets come more in line with tethered headsets, it becomes easier for developers to create great games that work in both places—allowing them to offer their work to a wider audience—rather than needing to design substantially different titles between mobile VR and tethered VR. - - — - - You'll note a common theme from the above: all point toward a maturing VR ecosystem that's both more structured and yet more flexible—you could say that the framework that underpins the VR ecosystem is better defined than ever before, while the walls of that framework are getting lower and lower, making it easier for new players to join the fray. The next generation of VR will be easier to build and design for (in both hardware and software), while fostering healthy competition.