OSVR

OSVR
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Information
Type	Virtual Reality software framework
Industry	Virtual Reality
Developer	Razer, Sensics
Written In	C++, C
Operating System	Windows, Linux, macOS, Android
License	Apache License 2.0
Supported Devices	OSVR Hacker Dev Kit, third-party VR headsets and peripherals
Release Date	2015
Website	http://www.osvr.org/ (defunct), https://github.com/OSVR

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OSVR (short for Open Source Virtual Reality) is a discontinued open-source software framework and hardware ecosystem for Virtual Reality. It was announced at CES on January 6, 2015 by Razer and Sensics, and was positioned as a vendor-neutral standard meant to let a single application run across many different VR headsets and input devices. Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan described the effort as an attempt to build "the Android of VR," with the goal of bringing standardization to a fragmented market.

OSVR had two largely independent parts: an open-source software platform (a layer of middleware that abstracts VR hardware away from applications) and an open hardware reference design, the OSVR Hacker Dev Kit (HDK) head-mounted display. The project was primarily sponsored by Razer and Sensics, and at its peak it listed hundreds of partner companies.

Although OSVR accrued a large list of supporters, few commercial products ever shipped on the platform, and Razer quietly stepped back from it after the Khronos Group formed the OpenXR working group. By roughly 2018 to 2019 the project was effectively dormant, and it is no longer actively developed.

Software framework

The OSVR software platform is an open-source set of libraries and tools that "provides an easy and standardized way to discover, configure and operate hundreds of devices," including VR goggles, position trackers, depth cameras, and game controllers, across multiple operating systems. Its design goal is to be both hardware-agnostic and engine-agnostic, so that an application written once can run against any supported device without hardcoding support for particular hardware.

Device abstraction

Rather than exposing a hardware-specific API, OSVR standardizes the interface between input devices, applications, and output devices. It presents generic interfaces, described as "pipes of data," and makes all sensing and rendering data available through a path tree similar to a URL or filesystem path. An application asks for data at a semantic path such as /me/hands/left or /me/hands/right, while a device plugin advertises which paths it supplies. For example, plugins for Leap Motion and the Razer Hydra both feed hand-tracking data into those same semantic paths, so the application is oblivious to which physical device is actually connected.

OSVR-Core

The framework's foundation is OSVR-Core, described in its repository as "the core libraries, applications, and plugins of the OSVR software platform." It is written mostly in C++ with a C API, and is released under the Apache License 2.0. OSVR-Core uses a client-server model: developers build hardware support with the PluginKit library, and applications consume that data through the ClientKit library, with device behavior described in JSON configuration files. Because plugins can be either open or closed source, vendors are able to add support for new devices, or analysis features such as gesture recognition and sensor fusion, without modifying the core.

RenderManager

OSVR RenderManager is a rendering component developed by Sensics and licensed under Apache 2.0. It handles the display side of VR by performing distortion correction, time warp, and client-side prediction across multiple graphics APIs, and it supports both extended-mode and direct-mode output. On September 4, 2015, OSVR announced that RenderManager would use NVIDIA's GameWorks VR API, adding three capabilities: Direct Mode (the driver treats the headset as a display reserved for VR applications rather than a normal Windows monitor), Front Render Buffering (the GPU renders directly to the front buffer to cut latency), and Context Priority (GPU scheduling control that enables asynchronous time warp). The same announcement added 65 new collaborators, bringing the partner count to roughly 230.

Engine integration

OSVR shipped plugins for the major game engines so that developers did not have to integrate the framework by hand. The Unity integration is built on a Unity-independent .NET binding called Managed-OSVR and uses OSVR-RenderManager for direct-mode rendering, lens correction, and timewarp. Support for Unreal Engine was merged into the official Unreal Engine 4.12 release in June 2016, where the OSVR plugin appears in the engine's Virtual Reality section and can be enabled per project. There was also an integration for the MonoGame framework.

Licensing

The OSVR software platform, including OSVR-Core and RenderManager, is open source under the Apache License 2.0. Several bundled third-party dependencies carry their own permissive licenses such as the Boost Software License, MPL 2.0, and MIT. The HDK hardware design files were published separately. Early production files and a development roadmap were opened in 2015, and a fuller set of hardware source files was released in August 2018, though under a proprietary, source-available license rather than a fully open one.

OSVR Hacker Dev Kit

The OSVR Hacker Dev Kit (HDK) is the open hardware reference headset that launched alongside the software. It was jointly designed by Razer and Sensics and was deliberately modular, built from replaceable circuit boards and an interchangeable faceplate so that developers could modify it or swap in new components as hardware improved. The schematics were made available at no cost. Two main generations were produced: the original HDK 1.x line and the higher-resolution HDK 2.

HDK 1.x

The first Hacker Dev Kit was announced at CES 2015 with a 5.5-inch 1080p display (1920x1080 at 60 Hz), dual-element aspheric optics with a 100-degree field of view, and an inertial sensor package (accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass) for rotational tracking, paired with a belt box module for audio and signal handling. It was priced at $199.99 and began shipping to developers on July 6, 2015. Later revisions upgraded the panel to a low-persistence 1080p OLED and added optional positional tracking through an infrared faceplate and external IR camera that ran at 100 Hz; the version 1.2 headset sold for $299, with a $129 IR upgrade kit offered to earlier owners. The final 1.x revision, the HDK 1.4, retained the 1920x1080 60 Hz display and shipped at $299.

HDK 2

The HDK 2 was announced on June 13, 2016 and brought the resolution up to match the consumer Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. It used dual low-persistence OLED panels for a total resolution of 2160x1200 (1080x1200 per eye, about 441 pixels per inch) running at 90 Hz, with a 110-degree field of view and Razer's "Image Quality Enhancer" technology meant to reduce the screen door effect. It shipped in July 2016 at $399, positioned as a cheaper alternative to the Rift and Vive, though it did not include the room-scale tracking, bundled headphones, or motion controllers that those headsets offered. A screen upgrade kit later let HDK 1 owners fit the HDK 2 display into their existing headsets.

Specifications

Specification	HDK 1.4	HDK 2
Announced	CES, January 2015 (1.x line)	June 13, 2016
Display	5.5-inch, single panel	Dual OLED panels
Resolution	1920x1080 (full display)	2160x1200 (1080x1200 per eye)
Refresh rate	60 Hz	90 Hz
Field of view	~100 degrees	110 degrees
Rotational tracking	Inertial (accelerometer, gyroscope, compass)	Inertial
Positional tracking	Optional IR faceplate + external camera (100 Hz)	IR-based (no room-scale)
Connectivity	HDMI 1.4, USB 3.0, audio out	HDMI, USB 3.0
Launch price	$299	$399

Partner program

A core part of OSVR's strategy was a broad partner program that recruited hardware makers, software studios, and input-device companies to support the standard. Early backers announced at launch included Sensics, Razer, Vrvana, Gearbox Software, Techland, Leap Motion, Sixense, Nod Labs, and Bosch. The roster grew quickly: the partner count reached about 230 by September 2015, and OSVR ultimately claimed hundreds of partner companies, among them Unity, Epic Games (Unreal Engine), Intel, Ubisoft, and Vuzix. To encourage actual content, Razer announced a $5 million OSVR Development Fund alongside the HDK 2 in 2016; rather than handing out direct grants, Razer purchased game codes in bulk and provided marketing support to participating studios.

Sensics

Sensics was the co-founder of OSVR alongside Razer and supplied much of the framework's underlying engineering, including the RenderManager component. Founded in the late 1990s, Sensics is a long-running maker of professional, panoramic head-mounted displays, with customers that have included Boeing, NASA, and major automotive and electronics firms. Its CEO, Yuval Boger, was a co-founder of OSVR and is known in the VR community for his "VRguy" blog.

Relationship to other VR runtimes

OSVR arrived during a period when each major VR vendor was building its own runtime, and it was meant to be an open alternative that sat across all of them. Its closest counterparts were Valve's OpenVR (the API behind SteamVR) and the proprietary Oculus runtime, both of which also abstracted VR hardware but were tied more closely to specific storefronts and headsets. Where the Oculus and SteamVR stacks were backed by large platforms with their own headsets and content stores, OSVR depended on third-party adoption that largely did not materialize at scale.

The standardization problem OSVR set out to solve was eventually taken up by the Khronos Group, which announced the OpenXR working group at GDC on February 27, 2017 to create a single royalty-free standard for VR and Augmented Reality across vendors. OpenXR drew in the platform holders that OSVR never had, including Oculus, Valve, Microsoft, Sony, Epic Games, and Qualcomm, and it became the de facto open VR/AR standard that OSVR had aimed to be.

Decline

Despite its long partner list, OSVR struggled to convert interest into shipping products. Few VR titles were released natively for the platform, the HDK hardware lagged competitors on tracking, and momentum stalled after the consumer Rift and Vive launched in 2016. According to Tom's Hardware, Razer quietly abandoned OSVR when it shifted its attention to the Khronos OpenXR project, a move reported in April 2018; the company never issued a formal announcement discontinuing the platform. The last notable activity was the August 2018 release of the HDK hardware source files under a source-available license, after which the software repositories saw little further development.

By roughly 2018 to 2019, OSVR was effectively dormant and is best described today as a defunct or discontinued project. Its original domain is no longer maintained, and the surviving artifacts are the OSVR-Core and OSVR-RenderManager source repositories on GitHub, which remain available under their Apache 2.0 license for reference and reuse. The broader idea behind OSVR, a single open standard letting one application target any VR device, lived on in OpenXR.

See also

• OSVR Hacker Dev Kit
• OpenXR
• OpenVR
• SteamVR
• Razer
• Sensics