Open Standards in XR - A current overview of OpenXR and WebXR

The XR ecosystem has long suffered from fragmentation — every headset shipped its own runtime, its own SDK, and its own lock-in. Open standards are the industry's answer to this, and two of them — OpenXR (Khronos Group) and WebXR (W3C) — are now mature enough to build serious applications on. In this session, I will give a practical overview of where both standards stand today, how the open source ecosystem has grown around them, and make the case for why open standards are the foundation any developer who cares about longevity and freedom should build on.

I will start with OpenXR — its core-and-extensions architecture, how OpenXR 1.1 reduced fragmentation within the standard itself, and what the June 2025 Spatial Entities extensions mean for spatial computing going forward. I will then highlight what I find most compelling about OpenXR: that Monado, the open source reference runtime maintained by Collabora, now underpins commercial runtimes from multiple major vendors. This is open source infrastructure succeeding at industrial scale, and I think it deserves to be better known in the FOSS community.

I will then cover WebXR — what it enables, which browsers and devices support it today, and where the gaps still are. I will highlight the rich ecosystem of open source frameworks built on top of it, from Three.js and A-Frame to Babylon.js and Meta's Immersive Web SDK, to show that a developer can ship a cross-platform XR experience with entirely FOSS tooling today.

I will close the session by zooming out to the bigger picture — using recent developments in the FOSS XR space to illustrate a central theme: that the health of open standards in XR depends directly on the open source investment behind them. The communities, runtimes, browsers, and engines covered in this session are that investment in action, and I hope attendees leave with a clearer picture of where to contribute and what to build on.

• OpenXR and WebXR are the two open standards solving XR fragmentation — one at the native/runtime layer, one at the browser layer.

• WebXR removes the app store from the equation entirely — the browser is a viable, open distribution channel for XR content.

• Open standards have an uneven adoption story — notable platforms remain outside the OpenXR working group, and WebXR support gaps still exist across devices, which has real consequences for developers.

• Recent developments in the FOSS XR space — new headsets running open source stacks, compatibility layers, and open runtimes — show the ecosystem maturing beyond research projects into shipping products.

• For FOSS developers, XR is an area with meaningful open problems and open projects to contribute to right now.