Monado becomes the open source foundation for various OpenXR (VR) vendors

Collabora announced that their open source XR runtime (VR / AR) Monado has made some serious waves in the industry, and is now the foundation for many vendors.

While we have OpenXR, that's just the standard, the API developers build against (and what Valve now focus on for SteamVR too), but you still need a runtime to actually get everything hooked up and working. Previously, a lot of XR vendors went their own way with proprietary XR stacks but that has all shifted.

Collabora's XR lead, Frederic Plourde, wrote up a blog post to note how Monado is now being used by the likes of Google's AndroidXR, Hololight Stream, NVIDIA CloudXR, Pico's runtime (Neo3 and Pico4), PortalVR, and Qualcomm's Snapdragon Spaces.

As for why it has become the foundation for so many, Plourde notes multiple advantages:

• High Modularity: Monado is architected as reusable components. Need a specialized compositor, custom controller driver, specific distortion mesh, SLAM algorithm, or ML-based hand-tracking? Enable what you need, disable what you don't. Monado's build system makes it effortless.
• High Quality: Following the Mesa state-tracker philosophy, Monado cleanly separates the OpenXR API from its implementation. Rigorous argument validation ensures the runtime stays stable and predictable.
• Permissive Licensing: Our license supports diverse business models, with easy integration for both Open Source projects and commercial proprietary products, and no legal friction.
• Lower Barrier to Entry: Debug the actual stack instead of reverse-engineering a black box. Teams ship faster by focusing on their unique hardware value-adds rather than wrestling with runtime mysteries.

And because many more are using it, all the fixes and improvements filter back to the community to improve XR for everyone.

See more in the Collabora blog post.