About OpenXP
Open standard. Open future.
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The OpenXP experience format is an open standard for designing, testing and delivering physical and digital immersive experiences.
The origin
Why open?
OpenXP began with a simple and real frustration. The experience industry designs for how people should feel, then builds with tools that only speak in what machines should do, and the creative intent gets lost.
After over a decade leading the delivery of award-winning and record-breaking experiences as Group CTO of one of the world's largest independent experience design companies, Anton Christodoulou saw the same challenge repeat again and again: brilliant creative losing its way during delivery. Complex integrations, unexpected scope changes and production issues, leading to creative drift. Clients who tried to protect their investment by owning the code found they had bought the plumbing, not the experience.
Anton's passion for bringing technology-enabled experiences to life followed a diverse technology career spanning multiple industries — building one of the UK's first internet credit-card portals, the first reality TV voting platforms, location-based mobile personalisation platforms, portable cloud operating systems, realtime AI-driven retail analytics, and a global experience platform used by major brands, including Nike, Samsung, Visa, Jaguar Land Rover, MLB, Mastercard, Rolls-Royce, Canon, Ford, and NEOM. Building on these learnings, OpenXP offers the industry a truly open common design language for experience, that is owned by no one, and can be used by everyone.
Portability
Write once. Run anywhere.
An open standard means your work is truly portable. One OpenXP experience file holds everything: the moments, the emotional arc, the sensors and screens, and the rules that make it adapt. Any software built to this standard can read the file, edit it, and run it. No proprietary format, no hidden dependency, no integration tax when you switch tools or venues. The same file that runs in a theme park can run in a museum, a retail store, or a concert hall, on any hardware that supports it.
The OpenXP experience format is like PDF. One open, human-readable standard. It opens in any reader, on any device, looks the same everywhere, and no one is locked to a single viewer or editor. Design your experience once, in a format the whole industry can read, and run it anywhere.
Open architecture
No lock-in. Lower cost.
Everything rests on a simple promise — own your work, run it anywhere, never get trapped. None of this is delivered as goodwill — it is infrastructure.
The format is open. The OpenXP experience format is published as an open standard under a Creative Commons licence. There is one official version, openly governed and clearly numbered, so you always know which version your work runs on, and no one can change it underneath you, or take it away.
The core software is open too. The parser, generator, validator, runtime, connector fabric, and bridge are all free and open-source: run them, extend them, embed them, forever. The free-to-use AI authoring tool, XP Studio, can be used commercially — or you can build your own. Whatever you build on top stays yours and stays private, because the licence covers our tools, never the experience you make with them.
Download the champion kit (PDF) →The OpenXP experience format is an open standard under CC-BY-4.0: one official, versioned format anyone can build on, that no single company can own or take away.
The runtime, the fabric, and XP Bridge are open-source and free. XP Studio is free to use, commercial use included. Build on top, keep your work private: the licence covers our tools, not what you make.
No single vendor owns the format, so you are never locked in. The same experience file runs on any software that supports the standard, and the format outlives any one supplier.
Open book
Free to run. Pay to scale.
One experience, at one venue, never needs the cloud, and never will. You can author it, run it, and own it for free, on your own hardware, forever. That is not a trial or a teaser. It is the foundation, and it cannot be taken away.
The cloud earns its keep at a different scale. Once you start running multiple experiences across multiple venues, an estate, and you need them coordinated, monitored, and managed from one place — that is XP Cloud. It is the one part of OpenXP we charge for, and here we explain clearly why.
We charge because it costs real money to run. It costs nothing to use the runtime on your own hardware. The cost of managing a live estate is very different — requiring hosting and scaling infrastructure that runs every day, for every experience, at every venue.
To ensure that maintaining an industry open standard is more than just words, the paid cloud layer is what enables the free layer to stay free.
See how the Cloud works →The invitation
Help us build an industry open standard. Together.
Join the consortium
Join the growing group of venues, tool builders, and creative studios building on the OpenXP open standard.
Get in touch →Contribute to the open source
The runtime, fabric, and format specification are open source. Install, run, update, extend, and build your own connectors.
GitHub →Now you can build it
The experience your client's budget couldn't afford. With OpenXP, the creative vision survives the budget, not the other way round.
Get started →
