"Meta is attacking the 'Open' nature of OpenXR and degrading non-Meta headsets"

paulmelis · 15 februari 2025 om 15:38

https://www.reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/1iptqd4/a_call_to_action_from_mbucchia_meta_is_attacking/

Interesting call to action, and discussion in the comments, on Meta’s OVRPlugin and how their actions conflict with OpenXR’s openness and vision.

Since 2024, the OpenXR ecosystem on PC is under attack. What you have all enjoyed as a technology to create a better VR experience is in jeopardy and is at the brink of extinction. This attack is led by Meta, through a piece of software called “OVRPlugin”. OVRPlugin is a piece of software (a “middleware”) published by Meta for integration to Unity and Unreal Engine. OVRPlugin claims to be an OpenXR middleware, however it violates several fundamental principles behind OpenXR. Meta is using OVRPlugin to preclude developer’s content (games) from running on any platform other than theirs. This includes blocking applications from running with Virtual Desktop, SteamLink or ALVR, even if you have a Meta Quest headset. This includes blocking applications from running on your non-Meta headset as well, such as Pimax, Pico, Varjo, Vive, etc. More and more content has become subject to these unwarranted restrictions in the past year.

This comment on OpenXR’s pace of development…

I am / was a VR dev that worked a lot with OpenXR. I even pushed the product of my old employers to switch to this tech instead of having individual implementations for each system.

OpenXR is a good thing. But for fuck sake why is it so closed to integrate new path / possibilities. Even Meta pushed for devs to use it until OpenXR never made it possible to do mixed reality or even integrate trackers correctly… If they really wanted to kill it they’d just disable the option in the quest link to be an OpenXR runtime.

The OVR plugin being necessary to begin with is not 100% Meta’s fault. And with the current PCVR user base I understand a lot of devs are just going for the Meta implementations. It’s where the users are, it’s that simple.

To resume: OpenXR just doesn’t evolve fast enough to stay afloat with the new capabilities of headsets, controllers, and trackers.

… gets a nice reply on Meta not choosing to expose their APIs through OpenXR, but through their own SDKs:

Sorry, but you’re actually falling for Meta’s tricks here. OpenXR is infinitely expandable via its extensions system, in fact Meta do use this for adding features. The problem is it’s all wrapped up in their SDKs, which do non-conformant checks like mbucchia describes, and at this time they choose not to integrate with the official OpenXR engine implementations instead. Everything in their SDKs is totally possible outside, in fact I’ve re-implemented their extensions against Unity’s official plugin here: https://github.com/mikeskydev/unity-openxr-extensions

What do you think, valid points?

WilcoBoode · 20 februari 2025 om 10:50

It feels like a combination of Meta (being a major for profit) and openxr (being a slowly developing open platform) causes most of the issues with these platforms right now.
Developers want something that just works. Up until like a year ago that meant either:

Using Metas proprietary SDK
Using OpenXR with metas special sauce

Integrating anything else simultaneously was a PAIN, and I am a massive fan of open software (and force us to use OpenXR wherever possible), but it was not fun to setup projects.

Now that the rest of the industry is catching up (or overtaking them), we see better integration from the getgo. It feels to me like meta had this advantage, and used that to make it just a bit harder to switch to something else, so that developers would just not bother.
Now they actually need to (with Android XR, Spectacles being build on OpenXR and better integration layers to OpenXR in engines), and they start to sweat that they are loosing control over their so far dominant strategy.

OpenXR used to be a pain, with an immense amount of bugs and only half-supported features. As mentioned in the posts, things like eye-tracking, trackers, (and now passthrough ) were part of the standard from an early moment, but some of these functions took ages to mature and often only worked half or not at all.
But the wider industry push shows that it is becoming better and is an actually valid base-layer than proprietary SDKs per se are, especially for multi platform support.

No doubt to me that Meta is making it more difficult than necessary to use OpenXR, especially with the older OVRPlugins, and their proprietary features. However, they were still some of the earliest companies that did actually provide a OpenXR support, so while they are making it difficult, they did also help to push the standard.

With the new tools that they are creating (Spatial Editor for example), they are focusing on their own platform again, and it makes sense from a big for profit that spend billions into the industry to favour their own product. So I dont really blaim them, as long as they provide actual proper support for the base-features that OpenXR should deliver.