Khronos Group

Khronos Group
Information
Type	Non-profit industry consortium
Industry	Open standards, Computer graphics, Virtual reality, Augmented reality
Founded	January 2000
Founder	3Dlabs, ATI, Discreet, Evans & Sutherland, Intel, SGI, Sun Microsystems
Headquarters	Beaverton, Oregon, United States
Notable Personnel	Neil Trevett (President)
Products	OpenXR, Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenGL ES, WebGL, glTF, OpenCL, SPIR-V, SYCL
Website	https://www.khronos.org

The Khronos Group is a non-profit, member-funded industry consortium that develops royalty-free open standards for 3D graphics, virtual and augmented reality, parallel computing, machine learning, and vision processing. It was founded in January 2000 and is incorporated in the United States, with an administrative base in Beaverton, Oregon. The consortium is best known in the Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality fields for OpenXR, a cross-platform application programming interface (API) for XR hardware, and for graphics standards such as Vulkan, OpenGL, and glTF that VR and AR software is built on.

Khronos standards are produced by working groups whose members include hardware vendors, software companies, and academic institutions, and the organization uses a one-vote-per-member governance model. As of 2025 it reported more than 130 member organizations represented by over 4,800 individual contributors. The consortium's president is Neil Trevett, who concurrently holds the role of vice president of developer ecosystems at Nvidia.

History

The Khronos Group was founded in January 2000 by a group of graphics and digital media companies: 3Dlabs, ATI, Discreet, Evans & Sutherland, Intel, SGI (Silicon Graphics), and Sun Microsystems. Its original purpose was to create open standard APIs for authoring and playing back dynamic media across a range of platforms and devices. Several later joiners, including IBM and NVIDIA, are sometimes counted among the early member companies that shaped the consortium's first standards.

The group's early work targeted graphics on embedded and mobile devices. It published OpenGL ES, a subset of the OpenGL graphics API for embedded systems, in 2003. In 2006 governance of the desktop OpenGL standard, previously managed by the OpenGL Architecture Review Board, was transferred to the Khronos Group, which has maintained OpenGL since. Over the following years the consortium added standards for parallel and heterogeneous computing (OpenCL, first released in 2009) and for graphics in the web browser (WebGL, released in 2011).

In August 2014 Khronos announced a "Next Generation OpenGL Initiative" to build a lower-overhead successor to OpenGL. The result was named Vulkan (initially referred to as glNext) and was unveiled at the 2015 Game Developers Conference, with the version 1.0 specification released in February 2016. In 2015 the group also published the glTF transmission format for 3D scenes and models and the SPIR-V intermediate representation for shaders and compute kernels.

In 2025 the Khronos Group marked its 25th anniversary, reporting more than 20 active standards and a membership spanning over 130 organizations across dozens of countries.

OpenXR

The standard most directly tied to VR and AR is OpenXR, a royalty-free open standard that gives applications a single API for working across different XR headsets and devices, rather than a separate proprietary code path for each one. The OpenXR Working Group began in 2017, and Khronos ratified and publicly released the OpenXR 1.0 specification on July 29, 2019, at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles.

On April 15, 2024, Khronos released OpenXR 1.1, the first core update to the specification. Version 1.1 folded several widely used extensions into the core API, including a gravity-aligned local floor reference space, stereo rendering with foveation, a grip surface pose, and a common UUID data type, and it added new device interaction profiles. Conformant OpenXR runtimes ship on hardware from many vendors, including Meta Quest headsets, Microsoft HoloLens, HTC Vive devices, Magic Leap 2, ByteDance Pico headsets, Varjo headsets, and the open-source Monado runtime, while engines such as Unity, Unreal Engine, and Godot support development through it.

Standards

Khronos maintains a portfolio of open standards, several of which underpin VR and AR content and rendering. The table below lists the standards most relevant to the field and their first public release.

Standard	First released	Description
OpenXR	2019	Cross-platform API for VR and AR devices and runtimes
OpenGL	1992 (ARB); Khronos custody from 2006	3D graphics rendering API; long the default cross-platform graphics standard
OpenGL ES	2003	Subset of OpenGL for embedded and mobile devices, used on early standalone and phone-based VR
Vulkan	February 2016	Low-overhead graphics and compute API, the successor to OpenGL; used by many VR engines and runtimes
WebGL	2011	JavaScript API for 3D graphics in the web browser, a foundation for WebXR content
glTF	2015	Transmission format for 3D scenes and models, widely used to deliver AR and VR assets
OpenCL	2009	Framework for parallel programming across CPUs, GPUs, and other processors
SPIR-V	2015	Intermediate representation for shaders and compute kernels, shared by Vulkan and OpenCL

Khronos describes its broader set as more than 20 active standards spanning graphics, compute, machine learning, and vision processing.

Metaverse Standards Forum

In June 2022 Khronos helped launch the Metaverse Standards Forum, a venue for standards organizations and companies to coordinate interoperability work for the Metaverse and spatial computing. The forum opened with 35 founding organizations and grew to thousands of participants. Less than a year after its launch it incorporated as an independent non-profit consortium separate from Khronos, with Neil Trevett serving as its initial president.