London, England – 19th July 2022 – Imagination Technologies and The Khronos® Group are holding the Khronos and Imagination Seminar in Shanghai, a developer event highlighting the rapidly evolving software-hardware ecosystem and the opportunities for GPU technology, open-source standards and open API interfaces across mobile gaming, automotive and cloud. Watch the Khronos and Imagination Seminar on-demand sessions and find out more about the PowerVR SDK.
AUTOSAR (AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture) and Khronos Announce Collaboration on Acceleration Standards for Software Defined Vehicles
AUTOSAR and The Khronos Group have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and entered into a collaboration liaison to foster synergy between the two organizations to encourage standardization in the field of Automotive and Future Intelligent Mobility. This joint technical collaboration between AUTOSAR and Khronos is intended to coordinate common requirements and developments with a focus on accelerated graphics and computing in safety critical markets.
Khronos Calls for Participation in New SYCL Safety-Critical Exploratory Forum
Today, The Khronos Group has announced a call for participation in a new exploratory forum to examine the need for an API that leverages the widely adopted SYCL standard for safety-critical industries such as automotive, avionics, medical, and industrial markets. The new SYCL SC Exploratory Forum is open to all at no cost, including non-Khronos members, and has been created to gather requirements for a high-level abstraction API for safety-critical heterogeneous computing.
Haptics Industry Forum and Khronos forge Cooperative Liaison to bring Haptics to the Metaverse
The Haptics Industry Forum (HIF) and The Khronos® Group have entered into a cooperative liaison agreement to foster synergy between the two organizations to encourage the integration of advanced haptics functionality into the Khronos OpenXR™ open standard for portable augmented and virtual reality, to enable broad availability of haptics in the metaverse and beyond. This agreement enables HIF and Khronos to collaborate with a shared goal to enable broad, cross-platform access to next-generation haptic feedback in XR applications, enabling rich multisensory experiences to reach beyond 3D visuals for the eyes and spatial audio for the ears – and include expressive haptics for touch.
Khronos Releases Vulkan SC 1.0 Open Standard for Safety-Critical Accelerated Graphics and Compute
Today, The Khronos Group announced the public release of the royalty-free Vulkan Safety-Critical (SC) 1.0 API Specification to enable safety-critical industries to deploy state-of-the-art GPU graphics and compute acceleration while meeting the highest levels of functional safety requirements. The Vulkan SC Conformance Test Suite is also freely available in open source, and multiple vendors have officially-conformant Vulkan SC 1.0 implementations. Industry feedback on the specification is welcome at the Vulkan SC specification GitHub repository.
Khronos Strengthens Vulkan Ecosystem with Release of Vulkan 1.3, Public Roadmap and Profiles
Beaverton, OR – January 19, 2022 – 6:00 AM PT – Today, The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards together with the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA) announces the formation of a new Khronos Working Group to develop an open, royalty-free API standard for controlling camera system runtimes in embedded, mobile, industrial, XR, automotive, and scientific markets. Over 70 companies participated in an EMVA/Khronos-hosted Exploratory Group during 2021 to develop a Scope of Work document that will guide the direction of the API design. Design work is expected to start in February 2022, and any organization is invited to join Khronos to participate.
Khronos Releases ANARI 1.0 Provisional API for Scalable 3D Data Visualization
Today, The Khronos® Group announces the release of the ANARI™ 1.0 (Analytic Rendering Interface) provisional open standard API for scalable 3D data visualization. ANARI enables users to build the description of a scene to generate imagery, rather than specifying the details of the rendering process, providing simplified visualization application development and cross-vendor portability to diverse rendering engines, including those using state-of-the-art ray tracing. In addition to the ANARI specification, Khronos has released a sample implementation, starter applications, developer tools and conformance tests into open source - and welcomes community feedback before specification finalization in 2022.
New glTF Extensions Raise the Bar on 3D Asset Visual Realism
The Khronos® Group announces the public release of the latest set of Physically Based Rendering (PBR) material extensions for the Khronos glTF™ 3D asset format. The new extensions enable material properties such as refraction, color attenuation, and volumetric properties to be used by diverse renderers from real-time rasterization to production-class path-tracing. glTF is a flexible, royalty-free asset format from Khronos designed for efficient run-time transmission and loading of 3D scenes and models on a wide variety of platforms including web browsers, mobile devices, PC desktops and the cloud. Leading rendering engines such as Babylon.js, Google’s Filament, and three.js already support some or all of the new PBR extensions, together with applications including Adobe’s Substance 3D Stager, Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE Platform, DGG RapidCompact and UX3D’s Gestaltor.
Khronos Launches 3D Commerce Viewer Certification Program
The Khronos Group announces the release of the 3D Commerce Viewer Certification program. Viewer Certification clears the way for 3D and AR-powered shopping and the proliferation of digital goods by ensuring that 3D assets look the same across the metaverse.
The Khronos Group announces the ratification of KTX 2.0, adding support for Basis Universal supercompression to this container format for reliable, ubiquitous distribution of GPU textures. Basis Universal is a compression technology developed by Binomial that produces compact textures that can be efficiently transcoded to a variety of GPU compressed texture formats at run-time. Additionally, Khronos has released the KHR_texture_basisu extension enabling glTF to contain KTX 2.0 textures, resulting in universally distributable glTF assets that reduce download size and use natively supported texture formats to reduce GPU memory size and boost rendering speed on diverse devices and platforms. Lastly, Khronos has released open source tools and transcoders, together with developer and artist guidelines, to enable and encourage widespread usage of KTX 2.0 textures throughout the glTF ecosystem, including the three.js, Babylon.js and Gestaltor viewers that have already integrated support.
Khronos and EMVA Collaborate to Gather Requirements for Embedded Camera and Sensor API Standards
Today, The Khronos® Group, an open consortium creating graphics and compute interoperability standards, and the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA), the leading European industry association dedicated to vision technology, jointly announce the formation of an Embedded Camera API Exploratory Group, open to all at no cost, to explore industry interest in the creation of open royalty-free API standards for controlling embedded cameras and sensors. All participants will be able to discuss use cases and requirements for new interoperability standards to accelerate market growth and reduce development costs in embedded markets using vision and sensor processing and associated acceleration. If the Exploratory Group reaches significant consensus then Khronos and EMVA will work to initiate the proposed standardization projects at the appropriate organizations.
The Khronos Group announces the ratification and public release of the SYCL 2020 final specification—the open standard for single source C++ parallel programming. A major milestone encompassing years of specification development, SYCL 2020 builds on the functionality of SYCL 1.2.1 to provide improved programmability, smaller code size and increased performance. Based on C++17, SYCL 2020 enables easier acceleration of standard C++ applications and drives a closer alignment with the ISO C++ roadmap.
Vulkan SDK, Tools and Drivers are Ray Tracing Ready
Today, The Khronos Group announces that LunarG has released the Vulkan Software Development Kit (SDK) version 1.2.162.0, with full support for the new Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions, including Validation Layers and integration of upgraded GLSL, HLSL and SPIR-V shader tool chains. The Khronos open source Vulkan Samples and Vulkan Guide have been upgraded to illustrate ray tracing techniques. Finally, with production drivers shipping from both AMD and NVIDIA, developers are now enabled to easily integrate Vulkan Ray Tracing into their applications.
Khronos Releases Wave of New glTF PBR 3D Material Capabilities
Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announces the release of a set of new Physically Based Rendering (PBR) material extensions for glTF. glTF is Khronos’ royalty-free format for widespread, efficient transmission and loading of 3D scenes and models, known in the industry as the ‘JPEG of 3D’. PBR enables developers and artists to achieve photorealism through rendering parameters that correspond to real-world physical properties of materials in 3D assets. These new extensions for Clear Coat, Transmission and Sheen build on the existing PBR capabilities of glTF 2.0, and together with additional upcoming extensions, are creating a powerful, interoperable, physically-based material model for the glTF ecosystem.