Hacker News Reader

Comment by verdverm | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft MRTK is a great display of the possibilities. Super disappointing they nuked that team recently...

https://github.com/microsoft/MixedRealityToolkit-Unity

Though it would be nice if everyone could get on an open standard, like https://www.khronos.org/openxr/

The big question I have about the future of AR/VR/XR is how do we have shared experiences across devices without putting significant compatibility code on the developers?

View on HN

> Though it would be nice if everyone could get on an open standard, like [OpenXR]

Isn't this already the case? As far as I'm aware all major headsets support OpenXR, it's the games that are lagging behind. Hopefully this is going to include Apple, of course.

You're right about headsets, it's more about the tools for building that need to be on standards. This is where the pain comes for developers. It's like iOS v Android v web, we have to build 3 frontends today. With VR/XR that pain could be worse, because the libraries and modalities can add to the complexity. I suspect this will come down to Apple deciding if they want to play nice with everyone or build a moat by making snowflakes.

Maybe our tools like Unity can manage this, to reduce the pain...?

WebXR is the ultimate open standard we need everyone getting on board with, Apple included.

WebXR seems to be limited to targeting browser technology. The standard should address more than browsers, as OpenXR does, which includes WebXR in the stack. WebXR is not appropriate for Unity / Unreal based stacks

I think that gaming platforms, because they have long had to deal with the confluence of multi-user, low-latency, permissioned systems, are better poised to be the basis for shared experiences in XR

Reply on news.ycombinator.com