E130 - What's up, OpenXR? with Frédéric Plourde

This interview was originally sourced during my coverage of XR
Expo. Frédéric is always wearing two hats, he repeats whenever he
can. One is as the head of the XR Division at Collabora. The other
is the hat of an Outreach Officer for OpenXR. When you work with
him as a journalist, you recognize that immediately. He is always
aware of what he can and cannot say, driven by the politics within
his organizations. That includes negotiations about which passages
stay in the podcast and which do not. Only three small parts were
removed from our original recording due to that process. None of
them are important for normal people, but very important for people
within the OpenXR cosmos, it seems. Why do I mention this? Working
on standards like OpenXR is a matter of politics—between big corps,
open-source evangelists, and XR enthusiasts. That is what I learned
after the podcast recording. In this interview, Thomas Bedenk and I
try to get a feeling of where OpenXR stands, how it has developed
over the last couple of years, and where it is heading. OpenXR was
built in 2017 with the vision to clean up a landscape of messy
SDKs. In 2019, version 1.0 was released. But it has only been
within the last 18 months that OpenXR has become the quasi-standard
for XR development. The reason behind this is not only the
existence of standards, but that major stakeholders committed to
OpenXR. Google, Meta, Valve, and Pico recognized the necessity of
common ground for development. Unity and Unreal committed to OpenXR
as their primary interface. But standards alone are not enough if
you really want to develop effectively. Monado delivers an
open-source runtime which is used throughout the industry. As head
of XR, Frédéric and his team are responsible for Monado. Monado is
a cross-platform, open-source runtime that implements the OpenXR
API to communicate directly with XR hardware like headsets,
displays, and trackers. Unlike proprietary systems, its code is
fully accessible to the public and is used by major tech companies
as the foundational layer for their own XR ecosystems. Although
many of the organization's current projects are restricted by NDAs,
Frédéric shared insights into a major upcoming feature called
multi-app support. This feature will provide a standardized way for
multiple independent XR applications to coexist and interact
realistically in the same physical space, enabling scenarios like a
virtual Pokémon from one app correctly occluding a floating
calendar from another.