Nick Whiting from Epic Games explains the origin of XR (XR = Virtual Reality + Augmented Reality).

How the term XR was coined. A chat with Nick Whiting who is the Technical Director for XR at Epic Games and he is also part of the Khronos…

Apr 17, 2018

How the term XR was coined. A chat with Nick Whiting who is the Technical Director for XR at Epic Games and he is also part of the Khronos group.

Article by Micah Blumberg, Silicon Valley Global News http://svgn.io

This story began in the Winter of 2016 when a couple companies got together to talk about how everyone is making all these VR and AR runtimes and it would be really valuable for the industry to create a single API that did both and make the ecosystem more viable for developers by making it into a standard.

Eventually those early conversations that included Joe Ludwig from Valve, as well as Nick Whiting and Tim Sweeney the CEO of Epic Games around standards in VR led to a conversation between Joe Ludwig and the Khronos group to help develop a standard for AR and VR that led to the creation of an exploratory group called: The Exploratory Group that was announced in Korea at a meeting of the Khronos group.

At that point The Exploratory Group started soliciting participation from other major companies in the AR and VR space. Could they get cooperation from companies like Oculus, Valve, Google, Sony to come together and join the Exploratory Group to create a standard for AR and VR. By the time of the next group meeting in 2017 they had around 30 or so companies that said they were interested in participating.

So these companies combined made a statement of work to define the scope of their group activity, which they ratified as a group, and the hardest part was what to call it.

To hear the full story click the link below:

How the term XR was coined: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcPJK_1c28U