Participants will assess whether high-level, protocol-agnostic APIs can simplify and optimize remote offloading to cloud and edge infrastructure.
Beaverton, OR – November 12, 2026 – Today, The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announces the formation of the Remote Offloading APIs Exploratory Forum to explore how standardized APIs could simplify access to cloud and edge computing capacity by resource-constrained devices. Participation is open to all interested companies and organizations, including non-members of Khronos, at no charge.
Resource-constrained devices such as advanced smart glasses, VR headsets, and drones are limited by battery life, heat, and form factor. Offloading computing tasks to cloud and edge infrastructure can help overcome these limitations, but today each offloading solution ties applications to its own connectivity layer. Developers must rewrite applications for proprietary frameworks, manage multiple real-time network protocols, and acquire specialized networking expertise, so an application built for one network or deployment cannot easily move to another. Additionally, many offloading solutions operate as over-the-top services, which run above the network without coordinating with it and so cannot fully leverage modern network capabilities.
The Exploratory Forum will gather and document requirements and use cases from participants and the wider industry to determine whether there is sufficient consensus to develop standardized offloading APIs that simplify and optimize cloud and edge offloading for application developers, platform providers, and runtime developers.
Proposed API Direction
The Exploratory Forum will assess the need for high-level APIs that hide the underlying complexity of connectivity and transport from applications. Any resulting APIs would be designed to remain independent of specific protocols, hardware platforms, physical layers, and deployment models. The APIs would also complement the broader Khronos API ecosystem and relevant connectivity and network standards.
Who Should Participate
Khronos invites organizations involved in remote offloading, cloud and edge computing, and network connectivity to participate, including device manufacturers, cloud and network service providers, telecom operators, GPU, hardware, and runtime vendors, application and game-engine developers, and standards organizations developing network APIs. Ericsson AB and Collabora Ltd. are the founding sponsors of the Exploratory Forum.
Participation is free of charge for Khronos members and non-members alike, and does not create any intellectual property licensing commitments. A project nondisclosure agreement (NDA) covers discussions, enabling participants to openly share requirements and use cases. Detailed technical design contributions are outside the scope of this initial phase. If the forum demonstrates sufficient industry interest and agrees on a Statement of Work, Khronos will consider forming a working group, under its multi-company governance process, to develop a royalty-free open standard for remote offloading APIs.
Participation Details
These are the companies and organizations that the Exploratory Forum’s initial participants are affiliated with: Ericsson, Collabora, 5G-MAG, Hololight, and Tampere University.
“Cloud and edge resources can enable richer, more responsive experiences on devices that have limited local computing and power capacity, but developers should not need deep networking expertise to take advantage of them,” said Mauricio Aracena of Ericsson, co-chair of the Remote Offloading APIs Exploratory Forum. “This Exploratory Forum will bring together stakeholders from across the application, device, cloud, and network ecosystems to identify common requirements and assess how standardized APIs could better connect application needs with advanced network capabilities.”
“Developers today face a fragmented mix of proprietary offloading frameworks, protocols, and deployment models,” said Frédéric Plourde, XR lead at Collabora and co-chair of the Remote Offloading APIs Exploratory Forum. “Building ElectricMaple, our open-source XR streamer based on GStreamer and Monado, showed us these challenges firsthand. We look forward to working with the industry to explore whether a common API can cut through this fragmentation and let applications run seamlessly across local, edge, and cloud compute.”
“Over the past decade, we have built and deployed pixel streaming for industrial customers across on-premises and cloud infrastructure, orchestrated through Hololight Hub. For these customers, keeping sensitive 3D data on their own servers and sending only pixels to the device is often a prerequisite for rolling out XR. A common, protocol-agnostic offloading API would let developers focus on their applications while infrastructure providers ensure quality of service, and we are glad to bring our field experience to help shape the requirements for it,” said Aidan Howie, lead product architect at Hololight.
“Through hands-on development within the 5G-MAG Software Accelerator, XR projects based on open standards from Khronos, MPEG, and 3GPP, and ongoing work with CAMARA on connectivity quality management APIs, I am glad to contribute to this Exploratory Forum to exchange requirements and use cases, share implementation insights, and explore how network and computing capabilities can support next-generation media experiences,” said Jordi J. Gimenez, head of technology at 5G-MAG.
“Widely adopted open standards are a strong foundation for research and innovation. Based on our research on distributing the OpenCL™ API, it seems to us that the abstraction level of it should be suitable for cross-node computation as well with small expansions. We are excited to study this aspect further with this Exploratory Forum in order to expand the scope of Khronos APIs to distributed computing,” said Pekka Jääskeläinen, leader of the Customized Parallel Computing group at Tampere University.
Further information and participation details are available on the Exploratory Forum landing page. For questions, contact the chairs: Mauricio Aracena (mauricio.aracena@ericsson.com) or Frédéric Plourde (frederic.plourde@collabora.com). To request the NDA for participation, please contact the Khronos membership team at memberservices@khronosgroup.org.
About Khronos
The Khronos Group is an open, non-profit, member-driven consortium of around 150 industry-leading companies creating advanced, royalty-free, interoperability standards for 3D graphics, machine learning, spatial computing, augmented and virtual reality, and parallel computing. Khronos activities include ANARI™, glTF™, Kamaros™, NNEF™, OpenCL™, OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenVX™, OpenXR™, Slang™, SPIR-V™, SYCL™, Vulkan®, and WebGL™. Khronos members drive the development and evolution of Khronos specifications and are able to accelerate the delivery of cutting-edge platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.
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Khronos® and Vulkan® are registered trademarks, and ANARI™, glTF™, KTX™, NNEF™, OpenVX™, Slang™, SPIR™, SPIR-V™, SYCL™, Kamaros™, and WebGL™ are trademarks of The Khronos Group Inc. OpenXR™ is a trademark owned by The Khronos Group Inc. and is registered as a trademark in China, the European Union, Japan and the United Kingdom. OpenCL™ is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL® is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES™ and OpenGL SC™ logos are trademarks of Hewlett Packard Enterprise used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.
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