PICO Foundation believes that a unified rendering application model has significant advantages in terms of performance, privacy, and quality, especially in multi-application scenarios. In order to support multiple applications running simultaneously in a mixed reality environment, PICO calls for the establishment of open standards in the XR industry to prevent ecosystem fragmentation.
The transition from XR devices focused on immersive entertainment experiences to a general-purpose spatial computing platform requires the ability to run multiple applications in a unified 3D virtual environment. However, this goal faces significant technical challenges.
The current self-rendering application model relies on individual applications to handle their own rendering tasks, which poses challenges in shared space 3D synthesis, resolution management, scalability, and privacy.
To address these challenges, PICO proposes a unified rendering application model, where applications submit their rendering content to a centralized rendering service for synthesis. This model offers benefits such as high freedom in shared space synthesis, automatic resolution management, low per-application overhead, scalability, and privacy protection.
Although the unified rendering model requires updates and redesign of tools, it is considered a promising direction for building the future XR multi-application ecosystem. Both the self-rendering and unified rendering models may coexist, with the unified rendering model being more efficient for productivity and multi-application scenarios while the self-rendering model retains its creativity in highly customized and high-performance experiences.