Standards provide important benefits to industrial organisations and one of the most important is enabling interoperability of components and technologies coming from different suppliers making possible complex solutions, but also ensuring consistency of implementation across deployments so information and services can be easily shared. Standards enable efficient markets where buyers of technology have a choice of suppliers, also greater confidence when technologies utilise widely adopted standards – both in reliability and also their evolution through open and transparent industry consensus processes. Standards also provide protection for people and organisations by ensuring technologies and providers comply with required practices for safety, security, trustworthiness and ethics. Industries such as Manufacturing, Healthcare, Automotive, Aviation, and others have many technology standards, but also many other standards for protecting workers, patients, pedestrians and passengers.
Standards for eXtended Reality (XR) technologies provide similar benefits for buyers of XR technologies for new products and services. As XR encompasses immersive technologies including Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (MR) there are many XR-related standards published by government sponsored standards organisations such as IEEE, ISO, IEC, ETSI, CEN-CENELEC, and also industry sponsored groupings such as W3C, XRSI and the OpenXR consortium. There are so many that it is not possible to list all of the XR-related standards, but to give an indication of the extent to which standards have been specified the following is a sample of relevant standards grouped by their focus on components, interoperable frameworks or compliance. It should be noted that some broader framework standards also address specific components and safety compliance.
Component Standards
- ISO/IEC 18038:2020 – defines the framework and information reference model for representing sensor-based 3D MR worlds.
- ISO/IEC 18039:2019 – defines the scope and key concepts of MR and AR, the relevant terms and definition, and generalised system architecture for MR applications, components, systems, services, and specifications.
- ISO/IEC 18040:2019 – defines a reference model and base components for representing and controlling single or multiple Live Actors and Entities in an MR scene.
- ISO/IEC 18520:2019 – identifies the reference framework for the benchmarking of vision-based spatial registration and tracking methods for MR and AR.
- INCITS/ISO/IEC 23000-13: 2021 – specifies mechanisms to connect to local/remote sensors and actuators and remote resources, such as maps and compressed media.
- ISO/IEC 23488:2022 – specifies an image-based representation model for target objects/environments using a set of images and optionally the underlying 3D model for accurate and efficient objects/environments representation at an arbitrary viewpoint.
- ISO/IEC 19775:2023 – architecture and base components of X3D, which is a software system that integrates network-enabled 3D graphics and multimedia for a 3D time-based space that contains graphic and aural objects that can be dynamically modified through a variety of mechanisms.
- ISO/IEC 23884:2021 – specifies physical and material parameters of virtual or real objects expressed to support comprehensive haptic rendering methods, such as stiffness, friction and micro-textures. It supplements other standards that describe scene or content description and information models for VR and MR.
Framework Standards
- ETSI Augmented Reality Framework (ARF) – defining a framework for the interoperability of AR components, systems and services that specifies relevant components and interfaces required for an AR solution.
- W3C WebXR Device API – provides access to input and output capabilities commonly associated with VR and AR devices. It supports development and hosting of VR and AR experiences on the web.
- Khronos Consortium OpenXR – an open-source reference providing a common set of APIs for developing XR applications that run across a wide range of AR and VR devices allowing developers to easily adapt solutions to XR platforms for device manufacturers that adopt OpenXR.
- IEEE 1589-2020 – specifies an overarching integrated conceptual model that describes interactions between the physical world, the user, and digital information, the context for AR-assisted learning and other parameters of the environment. Two data models are defined with their binding to XML and JSON.
- IEEE 2048.101-2023 – specifies the general technical framework, components, integration, and main business processes of AR systems applied to mobile devices including technical requirements, performance requirements and corresponding test methods.
Compliance Standards
- ISO/IEC 5927:2024 – specifies how AR and VR devices are to be set up and used in the enterprise workplace in a manner that ensures health and safety is maintained.
- UL 8400 – addresses the safety of VR, AR and MR equipment including head-mounted displays, holographic displays, smart glasses, handheld devices, and interactive virtual simulators.
- XRSI Privacy and Safety Framework – a baseline set of XR specifications, guidelines, and regulation-agnostic best practices incorporating requirements from the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guidance, Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA), and other evolving laws.
- IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Extended Reality – provides guidelines to protect user data and ensure privacy in AR and VR environments, and emphasising the importance of informed consent and transparency in data collection and usage.
- XR Association Developer’s Guide – provides developers with fundamental design principles to improve applications across all platforms and achieve better user comfort and safety.
There are over 600 publications that address XR standards, guidelines and recommendations, including specifications that target specific vertical sectors such as XR standards for Oil/Gas/Electric, Construction, Education, Healthcare and other industries, as well as for horizontal XR use cases such as Training. ISO has developed the most XR-related standards and guidelines with over 200 publications. Still, there are further areas where new XR standards are being discussed, which are in various stages of preparation including:
- Streaming XR from the Cloud: Interfaces and protocols to enable XR experiences delivered over the Internet and reducing the need for substantial local processing capabilities for users. Standardisation in XR streaming will make XR more accessible and scalable for large organisations and for products with high customer volumes such as automobiles.
- XR for Collaboration Tools: Remote working has become the norm in many organisations. However, the market is fragmented with multiple collaboration platform suppliers each approaching inclusion of XR and immersive environments with different often proprietary technologies. While multiple providers is important for the market and competitive pricing, standards are needed that enable users to establish and retain familiarity in their XR environments when moving between different supplier collaboration platforms.
- XR Devices: There is on-going development of hardware standards to ensure compatibility and performance across different XR devices, which will lower the development costs for XR solutions and provide interoperability of applications across different devices. Work in this area includes standards for display resolution, field of view, and tracking accuracy.
- Virtual Worlds and Digital Twins: The concept of the metaverse, a collective virtual shared space, is gaining traction and multiple groupings are addressing technology standards for the development of metaverse spaces, as well as safety, security and ethical standards that should be applied to protect XR users in metaverse environments. Digital twins, which are virtual replicas of physical objects or systems, are also becoming more prevalent in XR applications, and standards for how digital twins integrate within XR solutions are needed.
The broad range of available XR standards and initiatives addressing emerging standards are helping to create more immersive, accessible, and versatile XR experiences across various industries. The work within the XR5.0 project is strongly committed to using existing XR standards, and also has specific tasks for introducing the research and innovation results that will be validated within the six industrial pilots as extensions to existing or emerging XR standards.