Ready for the Steam Frame, Khronos Group announced a new OpenXR "Best Practices Validation Layer"

The Khronos Group, the stewards of various open protocols like OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenXR and more just revealed a new tool for XR (VR / AR) developers.

What is OpenXR exactly? As The Khronos Group explain: "OpenXR is a royalty-free, open standard that provides a common set of APIs for developing XR applications that run across a wide range of AR and VR devices. This reduces the time and cost required for developers to adapt solutions to individual XR platforms while also creating a larger market of easily supported applications for device manufacturers that adopt OpenXR".

So it's the open standard for VR games to be built with, to sum it up easily for you. It's what Valve actually focus on nowadays for SteamVR.

What's been announced? Today, The Khronos Group released the "Best Practices Validation Layer", a tool in their SDK for OpenXR developers to ensure their apps and games will actually work as expected. As they said it "addresses a critical need in XR development: catching suboptimal API usage patterns that can lead to inconsistent behavior across different OpenXR runtimes".

Just because there's an open API, it doesn't mean developers will know exactly how to use it properly or to ensure compatibility across devices, and this should help solve that. As they went onto explain: "While the OpenXR specification defines the features that implementations must support, it doesn't always prescribe the optimal way to utilize these features. Certain usage patterns, though technically valid, can cause applications to behave differently across various XR runtimes or lead to performance issues that are difficult to diagnose.

The Best Practices Validation Layer bridges this gap by providing real-time warnings when developers use API patterns that may cause problems, even if those patterns don't violate the OpenXR specification."

Should be good news for any developers planning to support the likes of the newly announced Steam Frame from Valve for example.

You can read more in their blog post.