Enlarge / The existing Oculus Quest headset, which launched in 2019, likely won't be the go-to device by the time Facebook credentials are required for Oculus headsets starting January 1, 2023. (credit: Oculus / Sam Machkovech)

The next generation of virtual reality headsets remains unclear, but the VR software ecosystem just firmed up an unsurprising—and potentially unwelcome—requirement for a huge swath of users.

Starting "this October," anyone brand-new to the Oculus VR ecosystem will be forced to log in to devices using a Facebook account, instead of creating and logging into a separate Oculus-specific account. If you already have an Oculus account (which is free and doesn't require an Oculus-branded headset), you can continue using those credentials for existing and new headsets until January 1, 2023, at which point all connected Oculus services (and brand-new headsets) will not function without a Facebook account.

“Your use of VR and other Facebook products”

Though Oculus's official announcement begins by trumpeting how this change will improve the Oculus VR experience, it concludes with the exact kind of information-sharing and tracker-heavy deluge that many Facebook critics fear :

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Recently, Valve released a new SteamVR Beta that was aimed at developers with initial support for the OpenXR specification and it appears they're going all-in.

We've been wondering how Valve would be proceeding since then and they've now announced their further plans in a blog post titled " Transitioning To OpenXR ". Currently, the Valve-made OpenVR is the default API and SDK for SteamVR but that's about to change.

In the post they mentioned the challenges VR faces with developers needing to target multiple SDKs, this is what OpenXR is supposed to solve. An open standard run by The Khronos Group who also oversee OpenGL, Vulkan and other APIs. OpenXR also has the backing of a lot of companies including AMD, ARM, Epic, Facebook, Google, HTC, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Unity, Valve, and many more.

Valve have said they now expect new SteamVR features to appear on the OpenXR side, rather than through OpenVR. However, OpenVR designed apps will continue working as normal but the future is clearly with OpenXR. Valve themselves worked closely with others to help develop OpenXR too, so it makes a lot of sense for Valve to want to move away from their own API and onto a proper standard and this is a good thing for the health and future of VR.

If you're a VR enthusiast, what do you think to this?

This is quite exciting for the future of Virtual Reality, as Valve as now properly given their backing to the OpenXR standard and added support into SteamVR.

What is OpenXR? Overseen by The Khronos Group, who also oversee the OpenGL / Vulkan APIs, it's a royalty-free, open standard that provides high-performance access to Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). This way, developers can begin to target OpenXR and have it run cross-platform for XR (AR/VR). Standards like it are important so developers don't have to rewrite code to target each company going their own way with XR.

Thanks to The Khronos Group and the extensive hard work of OpenXR's many members (AMD, ARM, Epic, Facebook, Google, HTC, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Unity, Valve, and many more) VR now has a consolidated API to enable developers to bring universal VR support to their applications.

With OpenXR, for the first time, developers will be able to build their content in a way that will allow them to span the myriad types of hardware and software platforms.

Valve

Valve said this is only the start and they will continue expanding their support of OpenXR, with the developer preview currently supporting OpenXR 1.0.9. Sounds like support for OpenXR is quite far along too, with it passing "95% of conformance tests".

It's not enabled for all users, as it's under a Beta channel you need to opt into and it's currently aimed at developers to test with. It supports working with Vulkan on both Linux and Windows.

You can see their announcement here .