Shopify, a contributor in the Khronos 3D Commerce Exploratory Group, have announced they will be the first commerce platform to natively support 3D and AR shopping experiences. Shopify AR contributed up to a 2X lift in conversions on merchant stores in 2018. glTF is supported.

At Intel’s Software Technology Day in London, Intel engineering leaders provided an update on Intel’s software project – “One API”. One API supports direct programming and API programming, and will deliver a unified language and libraries that offer full native code performance across a range of hardware, including CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and AI accelerators. One API contains a new direct programming language, Data Parallel C++ (DPC++), an open, cross-industry alternative to single architecture proprietary languages. DPC++ is based on C++, incorporates SYCL from the Khronos Group and includes language extensions developed in an open community process.

VKHR is an open-source, real-time hybrid hair renderer written in Vulkan and developed under the support of AMD/RTG. Read the complete paper GitHub here.

AMD released a new version of their graphics driver v19.6.2 on Monday June 17th. With with release they have added support for 5 new Vulkan extensions: VK_EXT_full_screen_exclusive, VK_EXT_host_query_reset, VK_EXT_separate_stencil_usage, VK_KHR_uniform_buffer_standard_layout and VK_AMD_display_native_hdr. Learn more with a brief description of what each extension does and how to use them on the GPUOpen blog.

In 2016, the Uber Visualization team released an open source version of deck.gl and luma.gl, two Khronos Group WebGL™-powered frameworks for visualizing and exploring huge geospatial data sets on maps. Since then, the technology has flourished into a full-fledged suite of over a dozen open source WebGL and GPGPU data visualization libraries and tools, known collectively as vis.gl. loaders.gl, the newest addition to the vis.gl family, adds support for loading and rendering glTF™ assets across the tech stack. Read the blog for complete details.

Khronos President Neil Trevett will be speaking at the “W3C Workshop on Web Games” on June 27th in Redmond WA. The talk is titled “glTF roadmap: CTTF Universal Textures and 2nd generation PBR.” There are still a few seats available. If you are interested in attending, please register here.

MoltenVK 1.0.35 is this new release based on the Vulkan SDK 1.1.108 milestone. This MoltenVK update brings various new extensions like VK_EXT_debug_report, VK_NV_glsl_shader, VK_EXT_debug_utils, and others. More details on MoltenVK 1.0.35 can be found via GitHub. (source: Phoronix)

With the growth and adoption in mobile, web, and immersive platforms, 3D is poised to grow as a new shopping medium. Product manufacturers, retailers, marketing, and advertising platforms can use 3D to show virtual products to end-users to help them better understand a product online prior to purchasing and to help build brand loyalty after purchase. The Khronos has a track record of openness and responsiveness, with a well-proven IP Framework and multi-company governance model. The Khronos 3D Commerce Exploratory Working Group could directly leverage the work of several existing Khronos Working Groups, including: glTF, WebGL, Vulkan, and OpenXR. With enough industry support, this Exploratory Group will evolve into a Working Group to work on the development of such standards.

Q2VKPT – short for “Quake II Vulkan Path Tracing” – was a research project led by Christoph Schied, an engineer eager to bend the possibility space of computer graphics. Using id’s 22-year-old game as a foundation, Christoph was able to make real-time path tracing a reality on consumer hardware. His project caught the attention of Quake fans, tech journalists, and NVIDIA. Learn more about Q2VKPT in this twenty minute video from GDC.

The increased performance potential of modern graphics APIs is coupled with a dramatically increased level of developer responsibility. Optimal use of Vulkan is not a trivial concept, especially in the context of a large engine, and information about how to maximize performance is still somewhat sparse. The following document is a compilation of wisdom from some of the Vulkan experts at NVIDIA. It is not exhaustive, and is expected to be augmented over time, but should be a useful stepping stone for developers looking to utilize Vulkan to its full potential.

C++ Lambdas, first introduced in C++11, are an important part of the way that the SYCL standard is defined and implemented. SYCL is required to handle different types and pass around functions so lambdas are a good fit allowing anonymous function objects to be passed to SYCL kernels. We talk about how we use lambdas in our guides and documentation, but never about how lambdas work or even how to use them in SYCL, so in this blog post we will examine how they can be used in SYCL.

Version 1.93 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android) at https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/download.php.

This version fully supports Vulkan 1.1 and adds support for reading additional features and properties for the following extensions:

- VK_EXT_fragment_shader_interlock
- VK_NV_shader_sm_builtins
- VK_KHR_depth_stencil_resolve properties
- VK_EXT_buffer_device_address features
- VK_EXT_pci_bus_info features

Additional changes for this version:

- Updated to Vulkan headers 1.1.110
- Reworked Android UI/UX

This version has also been published to Google Play and can be installed directly from there, old version will be automatically upgraded.

All of the presentations and videos from the Khronos OpenVX workshop at the 2019 Embedded Vision Summit are now online. If you were unable to attend this workshop, you may now watch the seven sessions online and follow along with the slide presentations:

• Introduction and OpenCL Overview & Update – Neil Trevett, NVIDIA: slides, video
• OpenCL & SYCL – Andrew Richards, Codeplay: slides, video
• Intel Open Source SYCL Compiler Project – Konstantin S. Bobrovsky, Intel: slides, video
• OpenVX Presentations – Frank Brill, Cadence / Niclas Danielsson & Mikael Pendse, Axis : here & here, video
• Inference with OpenVX – Mike Schmit, AMD: slides, video
• NNEF Presentation – Gergely Debreczeni, AImotive: slides, video
• OpenVX Hands-On - Part 1 – Rajy Rawther & Kiriti Nagesh Gowda, AMD: slides, video

The complete video from Vulkanised 2019 in Cambridge UK is now online. If you were not able to get to this May event, you may now watch the seven Vulkan sessions online and follow along with the slide presentations:

• Vulkan Update – Kris Rose, Khronos Group Developer Relations: slides, video
• Vulkan: Live Long and Optimise – Michael Parkin-White and Calum Shields, Samsung Electronics: slides, video
• Vulkan Best Practices - Attilio Provenzano, Arm: slides, video
• SPIRV-Cross Taking SPIR-V to the next level – Hans Kristian Arntzen, SPIRV-Cross: slides, video
• Cross Process Sharing and Direct Mode with Vulkan – Jacob Bornecrantz, Collabora: slides, video
• Optimising a AAA Vulkan Title on Desktop – Lou Kramer, AMD: slides, video
• Panel Discussion - Alex Smith (Feral Interactive), Hans-Kristian Arntzen (SPIRV-Cross), Jan-Harald Fredriksen (Arm), Lou Kramer (AMD), Alon Or-bach, (Samsung Electronics): video

Open standards are opening up supply options for OEMs and Tier 1s in the automotive industry while also satisfying safety concerns. lya Rudkin, chair of the Khronos Safety Critical Advisory Forum discusses why open standards are increasingly important in safety critical applications in the automotive market. Comprising hardware SoC designers, software developers with safety critical experience, cybersecurity experts, and safety functional managers in various safety critical domains, the forum has combined a wealth of graphic and data compute expertise with functional safety experts. For experienced practitioners in the field of safety critical system design who would like to participate in the advent of industry safety standards for next-generation automotive, Khronos invites them to learn more about the Khronos Safety Critical Advisory Forum here.