Virtual reality is a young industry and, in its youth, many are scrambling to see what best practices will raise this budding market into the strong and healthy grown up industry it needs to become to sustain success. With so many trying different things, best practices can get lost in the shuffle. Khronos Group is attempting to create a standard API (application program interface) across VR components and, announced via press release, they recently received the co-sign from Epic Games.
We spoke with the president of Khronos Group, Neil Trevett, about the development and its implications.
Having standards across any part of development in tech can be a huge relief for companies big and small so it’s no surprise companies like Epic are getting behind Khronos on this effort. Trevett tells us standard API development extends market reach for developer’s games because they can easily port to different VR platforms and that benefits VR users who’ll have a deeper software ecosystem to fish from. He also believes having the creators of the Unreal engine behind them “would enable wider adoption of the standard”.
Development is an expensive endeavor so there will continue to be exclusives on some devices no matter how solid the standard will be, but having this type of foundation for the majority of the market is true peace of mind for devs and consumers.
Epic is a massive company to get support from considering their Unreal game engine is such a pivotal part of the VR industry, but they’re not the only ones supporting Khronos’ efforts. Representatives like Mike Jazayeri of Google VR, Jason Paul of Intel, John Carmack of Oculus, and Gabe Newell of Valve, have all echoed support for Khronos’ work on an API standard and more will surely chime in as we get closer to that reality.
