Jakob Bornecrantz
November 02, 2020
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Last Wednesday, we took part in an OpenXR webinar (full video) where we discussed two important topics about Monado, the Open Source OpenXR runtime. More information on the webinar including slide deck can be found here.
Here is the excerpt on Monado from the webinar:
Monado 0.4 passes all of the OpenXR conformance tests with both OpenGL and Vulkan, on desktop with a simulated device.
Monado is not yet an officially conformant OpenXR implementation because it did not go through Khronos' OpenXR conformance/adopter process, but because the OpenXR Conformance Test Suite is publicly available and Open Source, every user can run it on Monado themselves.
We also discussed our native overlay support in Monado, recapping and showing a small demo. My colleague Lubosz has blogged about it here, and had also previously blogged about the ground work we laid. Again, thank you to Pluto VR for sponsoring this work. One use case for overlays are 3D user interfaces like xrdesktop, which we blogged last about here.
Monado 0.4 introduces initial support for Android. This means the Monado runtime can be installed as an .apk, enabling OpenXR clients like the hello_xr example from the Khronos OpenXR SDK to run standalone on Android-based devices.
Initial orientation tracking using the IMU (orientation & acceleration sensors) found in about every modern smartphone is supported. Viewing OpenXR applications in VR works via Google Cardboard and Daydream display and distortion correction values. In the future, existing Google Cardboard calibration QR codes can be used to set up Monado. This is still a preliminary feature, as no performance tuning has been done, and there is not yet a public cross-vendor OpenXR loader for Android.
If you want to know more please visit https://monado.freedesktop.org/ and feel very welcome to join our IRC channel or Discord server.
As usual, if you would like to learn more about Monado or OpenXR, or would like some assistance integrating either in your platform, please contact us.
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