Patrick Cozzi and Christophe Riccio invite you to contribute to OpenGL Insights, a book containing original articles on OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and WebGL techniques by the OpenGL community and for the OpenGL community: from game programmers to web developers to researchers. OpenGL Insights will be published by A K Peters Ltd. / CRC Press in time for SIGGRAPH 2012. Given the wide array of OpenGL platforms, from Mac desktops to Android phones to web browsers, we invite you to submit article proposals on all aspects of OpenGL development, including performance tuning, recent GL features/extensions, application architecture, vendor-specific techniques, WebGL, and interoperability with other APIs. We are interested in proposals based on your unique real-world experience using OpenGL.

A new OpenGL blog has turkish translations based on lighthouse3d, songho, and other OpenGL and GLSL sites. All Turks of the friends of OpenGL are invited to help improve the content of the site.

KDE SC 4.7 Beta 1 features improvements to KWin, the window manager for the KDE Plasma Desktop, adding support for OpenGL-ES 2.0 and improving its overall performance on mobile devices.

Applications for Life Company released Box Shot 3D 3.4, an update to their powerful utility that digitally “shoots” virtual 3D objects. Box Shot 3D allows you to render software boxes, book covers, magazines, CD, DVD and Blu-Ray boxes, cans, bottles, mugs, bags and much more. No 3D-knowledge is required at all and the results look very professional because of raytracing rendering technology. The new release brings COLLADA format import support.

Mirada and Chris Milk have teamed up to create an ambitious transmedia interactive music video experience called “3 Dreams of Black” for Danger Mouse and composer Daniele Luppi’s Spaghetti Western-inspired concept album ROME featuring Jack White and Norah Jones. “‘3 Dreams of Black’ has made it clear that WebGL brings a lot of possibilities, but at the same time requires a level of technical knowledge that just a few studios have,” said Ricardo Cabello, Lead Data Arts Developer, Google Creative Lab. You can watch a preview on YouTube.

Phoronix is reporting lots of activity at UDS Budapest for OpenGL ES support. With talk of OpenGL ES support in QEMU, OpenGL ES 2.0 support is also coming to the Compiz and KWin compositing window managers. An OpenGL ES 2.0 back-end for Cairo was also brought up separately. Get all the details here and even more details here.

Engineered for the high-resolution tablet computing markets, the ZMS-20 delivers stunning 1080p high profile video playback, immersive OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics, HD video calling and a rich desktop browsing experience. ZMS-20 combines ZiiLABS’ 48 Stemcell media processing cores with dual 1.5GHz ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processors plus a host of new features such as DDR3 and LPDDR2 support, HDMI 1.4 and OpenCL. Product is based on a published Khronos Specification, and is expected to pass the Khronos Conformance Testing Process. Current conformance status can be found at www.khronos.org/conformance.

AMD and Mentor Graphics Corp. were named by winners consulting firm VDC Research Group Inc. of the firm’s “Embeddy” awards for best in show at the 2011 Embedded Systems Conference. AMD took home the hardware Embeddy for its embedded G-Series application processor unit (APU) product. AMD’s Radeon E6760 is the first graphics chip for embedded systems to support Microsoft’s DirectX 11, the OpenCL standard and up to six simultaneous displays, according to AMD. Mentor Graphics was awarded a software Embeddy for its Embedded Sourcery System Analyzer technology.

RenderStream announced its AMD Radeon based 21.6 teraflop servers and workstations for OpenCL / OpenGL / Brooks based applications and product development. The workstations offer 1,536 stream processors and eight GPUs per system, which provide access to 12,288 cores and 21.6 TFLOPS of aggregate compute power. As an example from information security, the HD 6970 and HD 6990 based VDACTr8 evaluated over 45 billion solutions per second versus 18 billion for the GTX 580 based systems, depending on the implementation.

The last part of this series about OpenGL and OpenGL ES on DB-Interactively blog. The other tutorials came with a sample project to iPhone/iPad and covered the most important concepts of OpenGL. This last tutorial comes with a lot of informations about how to make 2D applications using OpenGL. As well, this tutorial brings:

• Multisampling
• PVRTC and textures
• Optimizations

Gregg Tavares discusses WebGL techniques and performance at Google I/O 2011. Whether a seasoned pro, or a WebGL noob, this fast paced presentation is worth your time to watch.

WebGL pays strong attention to security - just as any web technology should. With growing recognition of WebGL in the press, we thought we would summarize Khronos’ work and stance on this important topic.

1. Khronos agrees that security is a vitally important consideration for any web standard. WebGL was architected with security in mind from the ground up.
2. All WebGL implementations already necessarily contain safeguards which prevent out-of-range memory accesses during rendering operations and access of uninitialized memory; please see here and here. These safeguards are tested by the WebGL conformance suite.
3. Defense against denial of service attacks is still evolving in WebGL implementations. Khronos has specified an extension to OpenGL and OpenGL ES, GL_ARB_robustness, designed to prevent denial of service and out-of-range memory access attacks from WebGL content, preventing any possibility of using WebGL to execute malware on a user’s machine.
4. GL_ARB_robustness has already been deployed by some GPU vendors and Khronos expects it to be deployed rapidly by others. Browsers can check for the presence of this extension before enabling WebGL content. This is likely to become the deployment mode for WebGL in the near future.
5. The ability to incorporate cross-domain images into WebGL scenes provides great utility to developers, but the WebGL working group is considering requiring Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) opt-in or other mechanisms to prevent possible future abuse of this capability.
6. The WebGL working group has been working closely with the GPU vendors in the Khronos group to make accelerated WebGL implementations secure and WebGL is influencing GPUs to provide even more flexible security options in the future.
7. There are no known WebGL exploits and Khronos will continue to place close attention to technical and ecosystem opportunities to ensure WebGL is a secure technology that can be used with confidence.

Additional information can be found here.

Updated May 16 2011

Intel announced Intel® OpenCL SDK version 1.1 beta conformant with OpenCL™ 1.1 specification. New version includes an alpha preview of SDK implementation for Linux* operating systems. Intel also introduces the new Intel® OpenCL SDK community where OpenCL developers are encouraged to explore and to share advantages of OpenCL workloads found on Intel® Core™ and Intel® Xeon® processors.

Learning graphics programming in the era of shaders can seem daunting. This website’s tutorials provide a firm foundation for understanding how to use modern shader-based hardware for graphics development. No prior graphics programming experience is expected. OpenGL v3.3 is used to demonstrate rendering techniques. Topics covered include: * Vertex transformations * Lighting, diffuse and specular, per-vertex and per-fragment. * HDR lighting and gamma correction.

Raspberry Pi is a functioning computer that fits in your pocket, for only $25. David Braben, a well-known video game developer who runs the UK studio Frontier, has spent his spare time trying to answer the question: “How to get young students excited about computers and more specifically, computer sciences like programming and hardware repair?” David believes price point is a major barrier for most schools from getting the equipment needed to teach kids the more advanced computer skills. But what can you get for $25? A lot! Provisional specs include an 700MHz ARM11, 128MB of SDRAM, OpenGL ES 2.0, 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode, composite and HDMI video output, USB 2.0, SD/MMC/SDIO memory card slot, to start with.