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SiliconArts sees a world of immersive experiences in virtual and augmented reality solutions using photo-realistic ray trace graphics in real-time for interactive gaming, visualization, design, and modeling. The team is composed of engineers with a passion for art and how to deliver it with next-generation graphics solutions.

Nicole Huesman is joined by Ronan Keryell, principal software engineer at Xilinx, and Jeff Hammond, principal engineer at Intel, to hear their explanation on why open collaboration — modeled through open source and open standards — is key to solving some of today’s biggest challenges in research and industry, revealing some of the misconceptions, or least understood aspects, along the way. Then they explore the value of open languages and programming models, diving into ISO C++, Khronos Group SYCL, the amazing SYCL community, and what excites them most about the SYCL 2020 Provisional Specification.

The Khronos® Group announces the ratification and public release of the SYCL 2020 Provisional Specification. SYCL is a standard C++ based heterogeneous parallel programming framework for accelerating High Performance Computing (HPC), machine learning, embedded computing, and compute-intensive desktop applications on a wide range of processor architectures, including CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and AI processors.The SYCL 2020 Provisional Specification is publicly available today to enable feedback from developers and implementers before the eventual specification finalization and release of the SYCL 2020 Adopters Program, which will enable implementers to be officially conformant—tentatively expected by the end of the year.

OpenXR was created with the goal to enable engines and developers to target a single non-proprietary SDK, easing the friction in creating polished VR experiences. Valve has worked closely with VR hardware vendors, game engine developers, and graphics hardware providers to develop this new API and we believe it represents a big step forward in cross-vendor application support. Valve expects new features on SteamVR to appear on the OpenXR side, rather than as new OpenVR APIs. Find out what this change means for both the Developers and the Users. 

NVIDIA released a fresh developer-focused Vulkan Beta Driver with support for more extensions and a little performance work included. The NVIDIA driver now supports:

• VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state
• VK_EXT_external_memory_host

The driver also improves the performance of vkCmdMultiDraw*IndirectCount on Pascal and earlier GPUs ​(Source: Gaming On Linux).

A new blog from Codeplay continues on from Ray-tracing in a Weekend with SYCL: Basic sphere tracing, which tackled rendering. In this second post, Codeplay shows how to use SYCL to improve the performance of the previous code further using some interesting techniques.

IKEA might be best known for its affordable furniture, cartoon building instructions, and hard-to-pronounce product names, but that’s not all its about. They’re also exploring how they can improve lives with XR technology, as today’s guest, Martin Enthed, explains.

Khronos is happy to announce that the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) in South Korea has successfully passed their OpenVX 1.2 conformance submission. Being conformant lets the world know that ETRI has successfully incorporated the OpenVX standard for cross platform acceleration of computer vision into their product.

While powerful, the Vulkan API can be quite complex for mobile developers. At GDC 2019, Arm released a set of Vulkan samples that illustrated a comprehensive list of best practice recommendations. Since then, these have been donated to Khronos Group and have been improved with contributions from other GPU vendors, and the well-known samples from Sascha Willems. The repository contains samples that provide a reference for API features and new Vulkan extensions, as well as performance samples focusing on CPU and GPU optimizations. This blog covers a few of these performance samples, focusing on considerations around limited power and therefore bandwidth on mobile devices with tile-based rendering.

FFmpeg 4.3 open-source multimedia framework has been released with Vulkan Support. On Linux, the Vulkan-powered AMD AMF encoder is now supported. Complete release notes are available in the project changelog, with some addition details listed on Phoronix.

Valve announced their current and expanding support for OpenXR, the new industry-wide open standard for VR & AR.

Thanks to The Khronos Group and the extensive hard work of OpenXR’s many members (AMD, ARM, Epic, Facebook, Google, HTC, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Unity, Valve, and many more) VR now has a consolidated API to enable developers to bring universal VR support to their applications.

With OpenXR, for the first time, developers will be able to build their content in a way that will allow them to span the myriad types of hardware and software platforms.

“We think this is an extremely important and exciting step forward for the VR industry.”

<model-viewer> v1.0 has been released. Combined with #webxr on Chrome Android your custom HTML/CSS flows naturally from 3D into #AR. You can try it here and view the change long on GitHub.

Twitter/ PublishCurate a story with Twitter What would you like to embed? Enter a Twitter URLGet Widget That’s all we need, unless you’d like to set customization options. By embedding Twitter content in your website or app, you are agreeing to the Developer Agreement and Developer Policy.

v1.0 of <model-viewer> has arrived! Combined with #webxr on Chrome Android your custom HTML/CSS flows naturally from 3D into #AR.

Try it here: https://t.co/bEviu5gVSP

API stability and improved frame rates round out this release: https://t.co/TIFLTGSyT9 pic.twitter.com/xIqku2SMd6

— ????‍???? ＜model-viewer＞ (@modelviewer) June 10, 2020

Raspberry Pi announced the Vulkan effort for Raspberry Pi 4 almost five months ago. A progress update in the blog shows some of the popular Vulkan demos by Sascha Willems running on Raspberry Pi 4. Starting today, development of the driver is moving to an open repository. You can find instructions on how to build and install the driver here.

SYCL has been selected as the programming model for Argonne National Lab’s Aurora supercomputer, the first exascale supercomputer in the world. SYCL’s selection is the group’s belief that it is an open standard that can be relied on long into the future. Learn more about SYCL and why SYCL and ISO C++ were chosen.

LunarG has released new Windows, Linux, and macOS SDKs for Vulkan header 1.2.141.0. The DirectX Shader Compiler (DXC) executable and GFXReconstruct, a new Vulkan capture/replay tool, debut with this SDK. Read on for information about other new features in this SDK.