I last vetted OpenXR in 2021 before starting my previous project. At that time it was definitely not ready for production. It had major bugs and was missing basic features. I opted to continue using the third-party XR plugin providers (Oculus, SteamVR, etc.)
Now in 2024, I’m trying to understand how stable it is. The list of supported standard features has grown impressively, but let’s see how they actually work. I started up a fresh Unity 2022 project with all the latest packages…and OpenXR still seems busted.
First of multiple examples: I couldn’t get hand tracking to work in the Unity’s OpenXR sample scenes with Quest Link. Clearly the data is there because if I run Meta’s hand tracking sample it works fine. But Unity’s sample fails to track the hands, and gives no errors or indication at all as to why. Perhaps this is only a problem for Quest Link, in which case that is still a complete no-go. Speaking of Quest Link in general, OpenXR seemed way less reliable at launching the Editor app in headset compared to with the Oculus plugin. If you do VR dev regularly you know that every time you press “play” and your headset doesn’t connect you feel one more small whimper of your dying soul.
After spending a few hours tinkering I switched back to my old stack using third party plugins with input wrappers, and it took all the pain away.
So, is anyone shipping stuff with Open XR plugin? Or should I keep on managing the third-party plugins for another three years?
I can also see a route where I drop SteamVR in favor of OpenXR while keeping Oculus for Quest development.