Supporting Software

Supporting software is required to connect XR software (e.g. a VR application or 360 video player) to XR hardware. This is typically a software package provided by the manufacturer of an XR hardware system. This may include a user-facing application with a storefront for purchasing content (e.g. Steam or Oculus) but also includes back-end software components which serve a technical role.

The most important component of this package from a preservation perspective is an XR runtime, which provides an API and driver to support an interface between XR applications and XR devices. It can also provide features that modify the behaviour of XR applications (e.g. improving performance of image quality). Examples include the Oculus runtime and the SteamVR runtime. An XR runtime can provide XR applications with a variety of interfaces with which to interact with them, which might conform to a standards such as OpenXR or OpenVR.

Runtime Name	OpenXR Support	OS Support	Download Packages
Oculus Runtime	Yes	Android Windows 10/11	Current version only downloadable through Oculus client. Legacy versions available on https://developer.oculus.com/downloads/package/oculus-runtime-for-windows/
SteamVR	Yes	Windows 7 (SP1) Windows 8.1 Windows 10/11	Can only be downloaded through Steam (see Archiving XR Runtimes).
Monado	Yes	Android Linux Windows 10/11	Source code available from GitLab, build packages available for Debian and Ubuntu only.