Khronos Blog

In March, we hosted a webinar that gave viewers a deep-dive presentation on the Vulkan Loader, presented by Mark Young and Lenny Komow from LunarG. They discussed different aspects of the loader, including its overall design, and features including dispatchable objects, instance versus device objects and commands, trampolines and terminators, extension handling, and much more. To get all the details, view the webinar here, or check out our five k

Khronos hosted a WebGL 2.0 webinar on April 11, 2017. We covered the new features in WebGL 2.0, and even saw a few demos. WebGL 1.0 was released in 2011, introducing plugin-free 3D rendering to the Web for the first time. Since then it’s been widely used for all kinds of web-based 3D applications both on the desktop and iOS and Android phones — especially for web gaming. WebGL is integrated into all the major browsers, including Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Edge, Safari, and Firefox. “WebGL just works for everyone.” WebGL is available on 92 percent of browsers globally, and 96 percent of browsers in the U.S. - enabling truly write once, run everywhere 3D applications.

The LunarG Vulkan software development kit (SDK) provides the development and runtime components required to build, run, and debug Vulkan applications. Developers can download the LunarG Vulkan SDK from the LunarXchange website.  This blog post will discuss security as it relates to the Vulkan Runtime and Loader on Windows OS.

Five years ago The International Workshop on OpenCL (IWOCL – "eye-wok-ul") started as a small OpenCL-focused conference. In 2017 it has grown to three full days filled with tutorials, talks, posters and many technical discussions. You’ll hear attendees (and yourself) saying, "I did not know this was going on and I should have known it before." It is a great place to learn the latest on OpenCL. IWOCL is May 16-18, 2017 in Toronto, Canada. This year’s conference program is on the IWOCL web page and includes four tutorials, 19 technical sessions, and a Khronos panel discussion. Below is a compact overview of the technical sessions, posters, and tutorials to give you the highlights in under three minutes.

Don’t miss this year’s OpenVX Workshop at Embedded Vision Summit. Khronos will present a day-long hands-on workshop all about OpenVX cross-platform neural network acceleration API for embedded vision applications. We’ve developed a new curriculum so even if you attended in past years, this is a do-not-miss, jam-packed tutorial with new information on computer vision algorithms for feature tracking and neural networks mapped to the graph API. We’ll be doing a hands-on practice session that gives participants a chance to solve real computer vision problems using OpenVX with the folks who created the API. We’ll also be talking about the OpenVX roadmap and what’s to come.

New things are always in the pipeline for Khronos, and we want to share the news. We’re rejuvenating the Khronos Blog, with regular blog posts about what we’re doing, what’s happening in our community, and insight from our members. We will have more regular postings from our members and working group chairs, and we’re also opening a call for guest posts from anyone who would like to contribute to the conversation! We want to hear from you; what you see as important in the industry, developments, trends, tips, and new practices from your perspective.

At GDC 2017, in San Francisco during February, Khronos™ released several new Vulkan® extensions for cross-platform Virtual Reality rendering and multiple GPU access. This functionality has been initially released as KHX extensions to enable feedback from the developer community before being incorporated into final specifications. One key question that we have been asked since GDC is whether the Vulkan multi-GPU functionality is specifically tied to ship only on Windows 10.

New for us this year, we participated in VRDC, which was an engaging event that put us in front of a lot of partners and potential new members and gave our members a chance to network as well. We also had over 1,000 attendees at our 3D Graphics Developer Day with people returning to attend sessions such as “Vulkan Game Development on Mobile,” “VR Innovation – Standards for API development,” and “When Vulkan was One: Looking Back, Looking Ahead.” Lastly, our booth at GDC was wildly busy, with talks around the clock. In case you missed any of our GDC talks, videos, presentations, and photos are available on our website.

It’s been just over a year since the glTF™ 1.0 specification shipped, and this open standard format for real-time delivery of 3D assets has already been widely adopted by the industry. Now Khronos is finalizing glTF 2.0. Here we discuss the path that has lead us to glTF 2.0, what the new specification contains, and how your company can get involved to provide your feedback and take full advantage of this major glTF upgrade.

We are pleased to announce the Khronos VR Initiative has decided on the name of the upcoming open standard for virtual reality and augmented reality: OpenXR™! Comprised of a who's-who of industry leaders, the OpenXR working group is creating an open and royalty-free standard for VR and AR applications and devices. OpenXR will encourage innovation while accelerating market growth and user adoption.

WebGL 2.0 is a long-awaited feature upgrade which delivers the OpenGL ES 3.0 feature set, bringing the browser’s graphical capabilities closer to the state of the art. WebGL 2.0 is shipping now in the Firefox and Chrome browsers, and all WebGL implementers have declared intent to support it.

COLLADA has had support for embedding physics information into a document for a long time but it has never been easy to take advantage of. Adding NVIDIA PhysX Maya plugin and openCOLLADA plugin together makes physics export much more practical.

Photos have JPEGs, music has MP3s, and movies have MP4 – well now 3D has glTF! glTF – it stands for OpenGL transmission format - is a Khronos-created, royalty-free specification for the efficient transmission and loading of 3D scenes and models by 3D applications.