When will we have OpenXR support for Vive Wave

[razoredge]

Oculus, Valve, Microsoft, Unity and Unreal are all moving towards the Khronos Group standard of OpenXR (not to be confused with Valve's API for SteamVR called OpenVR). We are in the middle of a big decision on where to take our 3 year old OG focus wave sdk for unity based VR apps for the Focus. Staying pat on legacy wave sdk for unity is a bad option as it will be deprecated,  moving to one of the 3 plugin options for Wave SDK for  Unity XR will also require us to rework our code again when they port to OpenXR. I realize there is no rework free path, but what is Vive's plan for OpenXR when it comes to your Wave SDK for Unity developers (not referring to Cosmos as I've seen @Dario's posts in the other Vive Cosmos centric forums). Thoughts? Guidance? Looking for an alpha preview guinea pig? 

https://uploadvr.com/microsoft-openxr-unity/

https://developer.oculus.com/blog/openxr-for-oculus/?locale=en_US

https://uploadvr.com/valve-openxr-steamvr-beta/#:~:text=“With OpenXR%2C for the first,a statement from Valve explains.&text=“SteamVR's OpenXR implementation supports D3D11,on both Windows and Linux.

https://venturebeat.com/2020/10/23/unity-promises-initial-openxr-platform-support-by-the-end-of-2020/

Edited October 30, 2020 by razoredge

[dario]

hi @razoredge, as a long time member of Khronos and OpenXR, we will continue to be active and supportive. We just became the third official adopter and in addition to the Cosmos we plan to support additionaly devices in the future.

OpenXR support will likely be a matter of switching XR plugin targets with Unity's XR management system.  Please don't view the Wave XR plugin for Unity as 3 separate plugins, In essence it's really just one. And additionally, if you've been using a toolkit that supports Unity e.g. VIU or Unity XR Interaction Toolkit (in preview) then porting would simply be a matter of switching the target XR plugin.  

Take a look at the Vive Input Utility (VIU) plugin, as even before the new Unity XR architecture was available it has always had a management system to easily port across many platforms and devices from the same source code.
 

[razoredge]

@Dario our main concern is limiting the coding rework when targeting Wave vs Oculus and potentially others, so we're trying to limit as much as possible any WAVE specific code....obviously there is inevitably rework between devices/platforms, but I was wondering if there is a list somewhere that clearly enumerates the specific assets, scripts, etc deployed by the Essence plugin

[dario]

If you abstracted your code either with your own framework (or at least wrapper classes) - or - you used one of many cross platform toolkits (including our VIU or Unity's XR Interaction toolkit) you should be ok to port across platforms without relying on directly accessing Wave native (Android) APIs.  I'm biased but I highly recommend using VIU (Vive Input Utility) for cross platform support including Quest/Quest2, Focus/FocusPlus.  

Of course it depends on the app's required features.   What specifically (e.g. hand tracking) are you concerned about for cross platform compatibility?

https://hub.vive.com/storage/docs/zh-tw/UnityXR/UnityXRPackages.html# describes the packages but even your screen shot (also included above) describes exactly the features each package covers. Do you mean you want an API by API listing? If you search the documentation you should find each of the feature sets documented. Let us know specifically what you feel is missing from the documentation.