Haptics Industry Forum and Khronos forge Cooperative Liaison to bring Haptics to the Metaverse
SAN FRANCISCO and Beaverton, OR — March 10, 2022 8AM PT — The Haptics Industry Forum (HIF) and The Khronos® Group have entered into a cooperative liaison agreement to foster synergy between the two organizations to encourage the integration of advanced haptics functionality into the Khronos OpenXR™ open standard for portable augmented and virtual reality, to enable broad availability of haptics in the metaverse and beyond. This agreement enables HIF and Khronos to collaborate with a shared goal to enable broad, cross-platform access to next-generation haptic feedback in XR applications, enabling rich multisensory experiences to reach beyond 3D visuals for the eyes and spatial audio for the ears — and include expressive haptics for touch.
OpenXR is a unifying, royalty-free, open standard that provides high-performance, cross-platform access to virtual reality and augmented reality — collectively known as XR — platforms and devices. OpenXR enables software developers to reach a wider array of hardware platforms without having to port or re-write their code and provides platform vendors access to the growing number of OpenXR applications.
“The OpenXR Working Group looks forward to partnering with the HIF XR working group to define the APIs to enable next generation haptic feedback in XR applications enabling more immersive XR experiences,” said Brent Insko, lead XR architect at Intel and OpenXR working group chair.
The HIF XR Haptics working group brings together leading haptics expertise and works to ensure industry interoperability standards have well considered functionality and levels of abstraction to enable immersive applications to portably access a wide range of haptics hardware capabilities.
“This liaison creates an important bridge between two industry organizations that are at the heart of many of the technologies underlying the metaverse. HIF’s member companies are applying their haptics expertise to ensure Khronos’ OpenXR open standard for rich XR experiences on immersive platform is fully aligned with HIF recommended practices,” said Eric Vezzoli, chair of the HIF XR working group, CEO of Interhaptics and HIF board member.
This new liaison will allow the OpenXR and XR Haptics working groups to exchange use cases and requirements to increase the profile of haptics within OpenXR, and to ensure that OpenXR is fully aligned with the needs of the haptics community.
“Khronos warmly welcomes working with The Haptics Industry Forum. Their deep expertise will help ensure first-class support for haptics in the OpenXR specification and accelerate the adoption of cutting-edge haptics capabilities in OpenXR-enabled platforms everywhere,” said Neil Trevett, Khronos president.
About Khronos
The Khronos Group is an open, non-profit, member-driven consortium of over 180 industry-leading companies creating advanced, royalty-free, interoperability standards for 3D graphics, augmented and virtual reality, the metaverse, parallel programming, vision acceleration and machine learning. Khronos activities include 3D Commerce™, ANARI™, glTF™, NNEF™, OpenCL™, OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenVG™, OpenVX™, OpenXR™, SPIR-V™, SYCL™, Vulkan®, and WebGL™. Khronos members drive the development and evolution of Khronos specifications and can accelerate the delivery of cutting-edge platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.
About The Haptics Industry Forum
The Haptics Industry Forum provides a unified, consistent voice of the haptics industry to the wider technology ecosystem. We publish influential standardization documents designed to accelerate adoption of haptic technology, enabling haptics to become a peer of audio and visual technology and an indispensable part of everyday digital products and services that matter to people.
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Khronos® and Vulkan® are registered trademarks, and ANARI™, WebGL™, glTF™, NNEF™, OpenVX™, SPIR™, SPIR-V™, SYCL™, OpenVG™ and 3D Commerce™ are trademarks of The Khronos Group Inc. OpenXR™ is a trademark owned by The Khronos Group Inc. and is registered as a trademark in China, the European Union, Japan and the United Kingdom. OpenCL™ is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL® is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES™ and OpenGL SC™ logos are trademarks of Hewlett Packard Enterprise used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.
