VRguy podcast Episode 23: Neil Trevett, President of the Khronos Group - The VRguy's podcast
Summary: My guest today is Neil Trevett, Vice President at NVidia and President of the Khronos Group. This episode was recorded on June 22nd, 2017.<br> Neil and I talk about VR/AR standards, overlapping standards organizations and what’s the best way for companies to get involved.<br> <br> <a title="Subscribe on Android" href="http://www.subscribeonandroid.com/sensics.com/feed/podcast" target="_blank" rel="noopener"></a><br> <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-vrguys-podcast/id1071083566" target="_blank" rel="attachment wp-att-25553 noopener"></a><br> <a href="http://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=80685&refid=stpr" target="_blank" rel="noopener"></a><br><br> Yuval Boger (VRguy): Hello Neil, and welcome to the program.<br> Neil Trevett: Hey Yuval, good to speak to you.<br> VRguy: Thanks for joining. So, who are you and, what do you do?<br> Neil: So, my day job is NVidia. At NVidia, I work to help developers get access to high performance hardware and GPUs. But by night, I’m also elected President of the Khronos Group. And we do open standards for cool stuff like, graphics and parallel computation, and vision purchasing and now, virtual reality.<br> VRguy: Good. So, there seems to be a lot of interest in virtual reality standards. Why do you think that came up? Why do people want standards and, what kind of standards are they looking for?<br> Neil: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think there’s a lot of buzz, perhaps even hype in the industry around both virtual reality and augmented reality. I think we’re in the early stages. I think virtual reality is becoming commercially interesting because, there’s … The systems you can buy, they’re not perfect yet, they’re still evolving very quickly.<br> But you can certainly do some really interesting and useful stuff today. And so, people are very interested … The developer community particularly is very interested to figure out how to bring new immersive experiences onto the current generation of VR hardware. And to … it’s kind of the early days of the Gold Rush, right? You want to stake your claim early and ride the wave as The VR market expands and kind of learns how to deliver more and more compelling experiences. And, if you look at the VR industry today, note there’s a lot of fragmentation. A developer who wants to ship across the maximum number of VR systems, has to spend quite a little time, just kind of doing busy work. Porting to all of the different runtimes. Like, the Oculus runtime or, the Daydream runtime, OSVR, SteamVR.<br> All those runtimes currently, because the things are evolving in the early days. They’ve all chosen very, no, perfectly workable but different ways of accessing the devices in the VR functionality in those runtimes. And, those differences are not really creating any value, they’re all pretty much doing the same thing. They’re just creating friction in the industry because, developers have to spend time porting from one to the other, to the other, to the other.<br> Very often, that doesn’t happen. Developers end up having the time and the resources to support just one or, one or two of the runtimes, which hurts everybody. It hurts the developer, because they top ship everywhere, and it hurts the different runtimes because, they lose out on getting good content running on their platform.<br> VRguy: And I would say that it also hurts to other constituents. One is the hardware vendors that are trying to get support. They’re trying to get high quality content for their hardware, whether it’s an HMD, or a tracking system, or a haptics glove or, what have you.<br> And then, the lack of standards in my opinion, impacts the end users, the consumers because, they are unsure whether hardware, and softer investments that they make today will work on next year’s stuff.<br>
