// the take
This is the official generated distribution of the OpenXR loader and headers from Khronos — the industry-standard API for VR/AR hardware abstraction. It's for engine and runtime developers who need to target OpenXR directly rather than through Unity/Unreal's existing bindings, or who are building a conformant runtime.
The loader implements runtime negotiation correctly so multiple OpenXR runtimes can coexist on one machine without conflict, which matters a lot on desktop where SteamVR, Oculus/Meta, and WMR runtimes may all be installed. Dependencies are minimal — it bundles jsoncpp rather than pulling in a dependency chain. CMake build is genuinely cross-platform (Windows, Linux, macOS, Android) and CI covers all of them, including an MSVC matrix build.
This repo is explicitly read-only — it's machine-generated from OpenXR-SDK-Source, so you can't file issues or send PRs here; newcomers who star this repo and open an issue get redirected elsewhere. There's no sample code in this repo (hello_xr lives in the Source repo instead), so cloning this alone doesn't get you a running example. It's a raw C loader, not an ergonomic wrapper — you're dealing with handle lifetimes, extension function pointers, and manual negotiation yourself, so expect a real learning curve if you haven't worked with Vulkan-style C APIs before. Actual functionality is capped by what each vendor's runtime supports, so extension coverage varies meaningfully between headsets even though the loader itself is uniform.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →