This year’s GDC will have virtual reality as a fundamental component, and one of the presentations will be about virtual reality development for multiple platforms with a single API.
Khronos Group, creators of OpenGL and, more recently, of the Khronos VR initiative, is the entity that will present a talk entitled “Changing the focus of innovation in VR: Can a standard simplify development in virtual reality between different platforms?“The speakers will be Cass Everitt, software engineer from Oculus, Joe Ludwig, programmer of Valve, Nick Whiting, technical director of Epic Games, Devin Reimer, CTO of Owlchemy Labs, Yuval Boger, CEO of Sensics and Alon Or-bach, senior standardization engineer of Samsung.
The talk will review the new functionalities of the Khronos APIs that will allow a unified SDK for virtual reality development, as well as information about the group’s VR standard initiative. A market as immature as that of virtual reality is already suffering from the problems derived from the existence of different development standards, which makes it even more difficult for developers to create experiences that, in themselves, will reach a minority audience compared to traditional video games and applications. Is it time for all the big guys to come together to make life easier for users and developers? It seems difficult, but initiatives such as the Khronos Group are firmly committed to it. We will see what the next GDC, which starts on February 27, has in store for us in this regard.
