On visionOS, running several 3D apps side by side in a shared room — moving them around, resizing them, switching between one that’s full-immersive and others that sit in a bounded window — has been possible since Vision Pro’s 2024 launch, under the name Shared Space. Everywhere else, it mostly hasn’t: on Quest today, only one spatial app runs at a time, alongside system-level elements like the dashboard and 2D windows. That gap just narrowed, structurally, for the whole open ecosystem at once.
Khronos has ratified and published a set of OpenXR extensions introducing “spatial containers” — the spec’s own description: system-managed spaces where apps can display XR content. Within a container, an app can switch between a bounded mode for multitasking alongside other apps, and an immersive mode that takes over fully. The extensions have been ratified and published now; implementations are expected to roll out across the OpenXR ecosystem through 2026, with the obvious caveat that existing headsets won’t all pick this up immediately — a ratified extension is a capability vendors can ship, not one that arrives everywhere simultaneously.
What makes this a structural change rather than a feature announcement is where it lives. OpenXR is the cross-platform standard behind Meta Quest, SteamVR-compatible PC VR headsets, Steam Frame, Android XR-based headsets, Varjo, Magic Leap, and XREAL glasses — Apple’s own visionOS is notably not on that list, and Shared Space remains Apple’s proprietary implementation of the same idea. Before this ratification, any one of those seven-plus platforms wanting Shared-Space-style multitasking had to build it independently, as a platform-specific feature with no guarantee of working the same way on a competitor’s hardware. Now the capability sits in the shared spec layer: build to it once, as an app developer, and it’s positioned to work the same way across whichever of those headsets actually implements the extension.
That’s the durable part of this story, separate from any single headset’s roadmap. Apple shipped a genuinely good multitasking model and kept it to itself for two years. The rest of the industry didn’t copy the feature — it standardized the category of feature, which is a slower but more permanent move: once an OpenXR extension is ratified, it stops being any one company’s thing to maintain or withhold.