The application of sound in XR is becoming more and more important, such as our commonly used spatial audio. My question is whether we can add sound as an extension interface to openxr, and it may become a part of the standard interface in the future? I don’t know whether the interface in this direction must be placed in opensl?
This is the first time toby.lee has posted — let’s welcome them to our community!
Welcome, sorry your post was delayed, because it was your fist time I think–I had the honor of approving of you 
(I wonder myself if sound is envisioned as a future core aspect of OpenXR, since it seems obvious that it would be, but historically hardware accelerated sound has been neglected. I wonder if it’s something the XR group deferred to the future or if it’s deemed outside its scope.)
Initially we deemed it fully out-of-scope, as something with plenty of solutions already (everyone has their favorite audio middleware, or their game engine does, etc), and not in urgent need of an open standard API.
However, as we move toward a model where you might have multiple experiences simultaneously running but located in different spaces (think like XR Desktop or a jazzed-up Windows MR “Cliff House”), I could imagine a role for a sound extension to OpenXR to spatialize the audio coming from various applications/clients.
The process for adding any of these things to OpenXR is discussion and vendor extensions as proposals, which can move along the pipeline to more central parts of the specification, per the OpenXR™ Working Group Extension Processes, and anyone can submit an extension, so if you’re working with a runtime vendor or otherwise would have an implementation (e.g. through an API layer perhaps) you’re welcome to submit an extension.
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That’s really interesting. I imagine VR would have special sound needs as the technology gets more and more sophisticated. I remember forever it’s been pretty much DirectSound or OpenAL and neither was ideal for games, but I’m not sure what it’s like nowadays. I think DirectSound may be deprecated and OpenAL never really caught on (I don’t think it was ever part of Khronos) so there’s never been a really clean, open/cross-platform sound solution like OpenGL.
RE “Cliff House” I find this totally useless and annoying, I really wonder if it’s just wasting my GPU resources and keeping my set hot in the summertime as I’m trying to work. I really like Sony’s breakout box solution, it’s so much more efficient and can treat your desktop as like a movie screen. That would be a far better design, and I don’t understand why it’s not an option. (Plus even if it had something in it worthwhile it can’t be navigated without VR controllers… that are so cumbersome I wonder if they will really ever catch on. My spirit was buoyed by a recent article that Apple has filed a patent for a system that puts a ring on your thumb and finger, which seems so much more practical.)
Just reading the OpenXR™ Working Group Extension Processes,At the bottom of the document, it is suggested that vendors join Khronos, but I know openxr is an open and free agreement. How can vendors benefit from intellectual property rights? What is the difference between the income of an ODM supplier and that of other vendors?
See here for details on the IP framework and how it works with the adopter program. https://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/
Any vendor may submit their own vendor extensions, whether a member or not, but vendor extensions are outside the IP framework. Vendors need to follow the Conformance Process and be an adopter to get protections under the IP framework and only for the core spec and KHR extensions.
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