Collabora has been working on OpenGL ES 3.0 support for Mesa’s Panfrost Gallium3D driver. Panfrost’s OpenGL ES 3.0 support has now landed in upstream Mesa 20.1 and works with a mainline Linux kernel. While the code is still experimental, it can be accessed compiling the latest Mesa and setting the environment variable PAN_MESA_DEBUG=gles3.

The Khronos Group gives out special recognition awards called Khronies. Khronies are handed out at our Face-To-Face meetings for outstanding contributions to Open Standards. At our last face to face in Barcelona, four Khronie Awards were given out.

Announced last March was Monado as an open-source implementation of OpenXR, the Khronos standard for AR/VR. Today marks the first release of Monado as version 0.1 so while it’s still early on it is showing much progress.

Today, The Khronos Group and the Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum, education and research complex, with 19 museums and the National Zoological Park, announce their Collaborative Agreement for the increase and diffusion of knowledge using 3D scanned models from the Smithsonian collections. Working with Khronos, the Smithsonian publicly launched their Open Access initiative today, which included the release of approximately 2.8 million 2D images and 3D models into the public domain with the internationally recognized Creative Commons Zero (CCO) license. Additionally, a variety of platforms will be launched to make its collection media, collections data, and research data available for educational and research endeavors, creative reuse, computational analysis and innovative explorations. Watch the launch of the Open Access initiative on YouTube.

While 3D technology has been around for quite some time, there are few industry specific standards for the technology. This has led to a lot of problems for retail clients. Vendors are attempting to address this issue is by joining industry initiatives such as the The Khronos Group 3D Commerce Working Group. This group aims to develop standards to streamline 3D content creation, management and display.

This month in the NVIDIA Developer Blog, Ashwin Lele and Ashwin Kolhe discuss how to use HLSL Ray Tracing with Vulkan. The NVIDIA VKRay extension, with the DXC compiler and SPIR-V backend, provides the same level of ray tracing functionality in Vulkan through HLSL as is currently available in DXR. You can now develop ray-tracing applications using DXR or NVIDIA VKRay with minimized shader re-writing to deploy to either the DirectX or Vulkan APIs.

Duncan McBain, Codeplay Staff Software Engineer, will be providing an abstract on developing parallel applications with SYCL, at Heriot Watt University on the 27th February from 4.15pm to 5.15pm.

Ultraleap has joined The Khronos Group,and started participating in the OpenXR Working Group. Ultraleap is focused on facilitating highly engaging, natural interaction between people and technology. The fast‐growth company employs over 150 people in the UK, US and Asia. It has become the first to offer the full vertical stack of software and hardware to enable immersive virtual touch controls for the automotive, advertising, industrial, immersive entertainment and enterprise sectors.

LunarG conducted a survey of Vulkan usage and Vulkan ecosystem needs in December of 2019. The constructive and informed feedback to this survey has resulted in a heightened focus from the Khronos Vulkan working group and ecosystem contributors to fix issues and provide solutions. LunarG would like to thank all the developers who took the time to answer the survey questions. Check out the detailed summary report.

Shrenik Sadalgi, 3D Commerce Working Group Chair ofThe Khronos Group, discusses how Augmented and Virtual Reality (XR) are changing the face of retail. Together, XR and 3D applications are positioned to completely change the entire experience of shopping by enabling consumers to view and interact with virtual products in real spaces or virtual showrooms.

This article describes the implementation of soft particles in pure WebGL / OpenGL ES without any 3rd party library or engine used. This tutorial is based on a WebGL port of Android live wallpaper 3D Buddha Live Wallpaper. Source code is available on GitHub.

There are best practices for GPU performance events that are universally used by profiling tools such as NVIDIA Nsight Graphics and NVIDIA Nsight Systems, for navigating through complex frame rendering. While all modern graphics APIs (Direct3D 11, Direct3D 12, Vulkan, and OpenGL 4.3) offer a simple solution to set these begin/end performance markers, they do not enforce the conventions that profiling tools follow. Read on to learn some Do’s and Don’ts to make your game work better with profiling tools and easier for NVIDIA engineers to help you optimize your game.

With the Godot 4.0 release is still months away from seeing its stable debut with the new Vulkan renderer, the Vulkan renderer branch was today merged to mainline. More details on today’s Godot Vulkan merging milestone via the GodotEngine.org blog. (Source: phoronix).

Peter Žužek, Senior Software Engineer SYCL, will be presenting at the Efficient Computing for High Energy Physics workshop on the 17th and 18th February at the Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics at the University of Edinburgh. His talk will cover an introduction to SYCL and the range of frameworks available to SYCL developers. As a model, SYCL enables physicists to write highly performant software that can be run on a broad range of HPC architectures. The workshop will run from 9am on 17th February until 5pm on 18th February. The workshop is funded by STFC’s opportunities call and by the Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics in Edinburgh.

OLV recognizes that Khronos and its members are playing instrumental roles in advancements of 3D visualization technology that they utilize in these tools today. More so, OLV shares Khronos’ mission to promote the use of visually realistic 3D content in online retail and are particularly passionate about product configuration. OLV is excited to be joining the 3D Commerce Working Group and to collaborate with other members in aligning the industry for streamlined 3D content creation, management, and display in online retail. Learn more about OLV is working on in this Khronos guest blog.