Finnish hardware manufacturer Varjo makes expensive, enterprise-grade virtual reality (VR) headsets which you might think run on very exclusive software. While companies do need to sign-up to a subscription, Varjo has ensured developers find it easy to support the headsets by making them fully compatible with the OpenXR 1.0 standard.
This sees all of Varjo’s headsets achieve full compliance with OpenXR 1.0, from the very first VR-1 and XR-1, to the latest VR-3 and XR-3 models which arrived at the end of 2020. The standard was developed by a consortium of companies led by Khronos Group, with the specification established back in 2019. Varjo joins the likes of Valve, Microsoft and Oculus in supporting OpenXR 1.0.
With Varjo headsets now compatible with OpenXR 1.0 developers should find it much easier to bring their projects to these enterprise-focused headsets. And make use of their particular features. The current VR-3 and XR-3 generation feature Varjo’s ‘human-eye resolution’ display which is comprised of a uOLED Focus area at 1920 x 1920 px per eye (70 PPD) and an LCD Peripheral area at 2880 x 2720 px per eye (30 PPD) with a 115° field of view. Being a mixed reality device, the XR-3 also has two front cameras; built-in LiDAR and stereo RGB video pass-through.
“We are proud to extend the OpenXR standard to our professional customers across training and simulation, industrial design, medical, research, and academia, to accelerate the merging of virtual and physical worlds,” said Urho Konttori, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Varjo in a statement. “Offering a unified reality for developers is an important step on Varjo’s journey in bringing immersive technology to every workplace – and eventually revolutionizing computing for all.”
“Varjo has been a valuable contributor to OpenXR since 2019. Varjo’s VR and XR headsets were some of the first to publicly demonstrate support for OpenXR,” said Brent Insko, Lead XR Architect at Intel and OpenXR Working Group Chair. “Today, we are extremely happy to add Varjo and their unique approach to delivering higher visual fidelity in virtual and mixed reality experiences to the growing list of companies fully supporting the OpenXR 1.0 specification.”
The expectation is that all future VR/AR headsets will support OpenXR’s royalty-free standard to ensure a thriving ecosystem where creators don’t have to worry about individually porting projects between devices. As OpenXR continues to be adopted VRFocus will let you know.