News Archives

Varjo has introduced the XR-4 mixed-reality headset introducing gaze-directed, high-resolution autofocus cameras in mixed reality. Supported 3D platforms and software include OpenXR, Nvidia Omniverse, Unreal Engine, Unity, Blender, EngageVR, MetaVR and Autodesk VRED.

“The automotive industry is consolidating disparate embedded chips into central heterogeneous SoCs to achieve the compute power and energy efficiency required by compute-intensive algorithms, such as the artificial intelligence algorithms required for autonomous behavior,” said Verena Beckham, chair of the Khronos SYCL SC Working Group. “One of the challenges is selecting the right programming model to enable efficient, portable, and safe code for these systems to be developed and certified easily. The SYCL SC Working Group in Khronos is working on such a programming model, which is based on SYCL and C++, but is being designed specifically to ease safety certification. Due to the popularity of AUTOSAR’s Adaptive Platform, Khronos is collaborating with AUTOSAR members to enable SYCL, and eventually, SYCL SC, to be used from within an AUTOSAR architecture to unlock the ability to offload computation to accelerators, such as GPUs.”

NVK, an open source Mesa Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs, announced that NVK is now an officially conformant implementation of the Vulkan 1.0 API on NVIDIA Turing hardware. This is the first time any Nouveau driver has gotten the Khronos conformance badge on any API.

The Khronos Group announces the launch of the SYCL 2020 Adopters Program to enable implementations to become officially conformant to the latest-generation SYCL specification—and to ensure that SYCL is consistently implemented by multiple vendors to create a reliable platform for developers. SYCL 2020 is the open industry standard for single source C++-based heterogeneous parallel programming. The SYCL Working Group has released an updated Conformance Test Suite (CTS) as part of the SYCL 2020 Adopters Program, making it available as an open source GitHub project to enable broad industry participation in implementation testing and ongoing test suite improvements. 

The latest update adds VDXR, a fully functional OpenXR runtime that can be used instead of SteamVR. It works any VR application on Steam that uses the industry-standard OpenXR API. Since 2020 Valve has recommended developers use OpenXR rather than its own “OpenVR” API for SteamVR.

Virtual Desktop’s developer Guy Godin claims VDXR gives roughly 10% improved performance over using SteamVR, and beta testers have reported this to be true. The tradeoff is that you’ll lose access to SteamVR’s features, like the ability to access your desktop in-game or interact with Steam notifications and friends.

Kitware and NVIDIA have collaborated to integrate ANARI, the open, cross-platform 3D rendering engine API from the Khronos Group, into VTK (Visualization Toolkit). VTK is a cross-platform and feature-rich data analysis and visualization toolkit used in application domains ranging from medical imaging to large-scale scientific visualization. Through this integration, ANARI offers VTK users seamless access to a rich set of hardware-accelerated 3D rendering engines and capabilities. Kitware is also working to expose ANARI in ParaView, their state-of-the-art visualization application built on VTK. Exposing ANARI parameters in the ParaView user interface provides access to the rich world of accelerated 3D rendering engines enabled through the cross-platform ANARI API.

In this new episode of Building the Open Metaverse Podcast, the Chair of the WebGL Working Group, Ken Russell, joined the show to discuss WebGL, WebGPU, and other technologies for web browsers to build an open and accessible metaverse.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge use SYCL as a high-performance language for solving differential equations with the finite element method.  SYCL is an open, non-proprietary, royalty-free programming language developed and maintained by the Khronos Group open standards consortium, with multiple compiler implementations that enable performance portable code on new-generation and multi-vendor hardware.

Wearable Devices, a technology growth company specializing in artificial intelligence (“AI”)-powered touchless sensing wearables, announced that the company has joined the Khronos Group’s OpenXR working group as a member with voting rights. OpenXR seeks to simplify alternate reality/virtual reality (“AR/VR”) software development and enable applications to reach a wider array of hardware platforms without having to port or rewrite code. OpenXR allows AR/VR developers to create true cross-platform extended reality (“XR”) experiences and provides vendors supporting OpenXR with access to more applications than ever before. XR is rapidly gaining popularity in the tech industry, and Wearable Devices is uniquely positioned to define the input standard for spatial computing and extended reality devices.

Unity’s AR Foundation is a cross-platform framework for building mobile and headworn AR/MR device applications. AR Foundation simplifies AR and MR app development by providing a unified API that works across multiple platforms, so you don’t need to maintain separate implementations. You can write code and deploy it to platforms including Meta Quest, HoloLens 2, and mobile devices like iOS and Android.

Unity's AR Foundation support for Meta Quest 3 is built on top of OpenXR. For several years, we’ve maintained and distributed an OpenXR plug-in that provides an implementation of the OpenXR standard within the Unity engine and establishes a common interface between XR hardware and software. By using OpenXR, we continue to bring development in line with an industry-adopted standard.

AdaptiveCpp 23.10.0 released! New project name, world’s first single-pass SYCL compiler, C++ standard parallelism, production Intel GPU support, OpenCL backend and more! A huge shift in the project’s capabilities.