ALL3D is focused on wholesale or direct-to-consumer brands in the home category. Due to Covid-19, the $250+ Billion home market is rapidly moving from brick and mortar to online. With this renewed focus on home and the absence of being able to touch and feel the product, home brands need better product visualization, 2D & 3D inspirational imagery, AR, virtual showrooms and immersive experiences. ALL3D software provides an end-to-end self-service platform, to enable the brands to create reusable, low cost content for at 1/10th the cost of traditional photography. This content can be used for websites, email campaigns, catalogs, social media, virtual trade shows and other marketing channels. ALL3D is the Shopify of 3D experiences.

The goal of the Vulkan-Hpp is to provide header only C++ bindings for the Vulkan C API to improve the developers Vulkan experience without introducing CPU runtime cost. It adds features like type safety for enums and bitfields, STL container support, exceptions and simple enumerations.

The maintainers of the Vulkan HPP library and The Khronos Group would like to understand more about Vulkan HPP usage amongst developers. Even if you do not currently use Vulkan HPP we would like to know why that is case.

• This information will be used to inform potential improvements or features for the future.
  
• This survey can take up to 15 mins depending on your responses and amount of input on open questions.
  
• Thank you for taking the time and providing your insight on this subject.

In the coming years, the booming online retail industry is set to be revolutionised by high-performance technology that’s more commonly associated with video games than digital shopping: implementing high render 3D graphics is one of the driving forces.

The groundwork for a revolution is already underway. Retailers have joined forces in an extraordinary collaboration that will lead to the creation of standards and agreed formats — a vital part of the 3D retail revolution. The work underway right now is similar to the process that led to the creation of the JPEG, a standardized picture format that’s now become ubiquitous in the past two decades. A total of 70 companies including Wayfair and IKEA are now involved in a project called the 3D Commerce Working Group, set up by The Khronos Group.

Naivi have used the MoltenVK layered implementations of Vulkan functionality over Metal, a part of the Khronos Vulkan Portability Initiative, to port their NAP real-time performance engine from OpenGL to Vulkan to ship on Windows, Linux AND macOS. Naivi discovered that Vulkan apps run just as well on macOS as they do on Linux and Windows, avoiding the need for a dedicated Metal backend. Switching to Vulkan dramatically improved render-times for NAP’s Mac users, as well as providing a significant performance boost on Windows and Linux. The article concludes “Vulkan does feel like the future of graphics.”

Now published by the Edge AI and Vision Alliance: the video of a talk by Neil Trevett (with slides) from the 2020 Embedded Vision Summit. For the full version of this video, along with hundreds of others on various edge AI and computer vision topics, please visit the Edge AI Vision website.

Kivisense’s main business is AR algorithms with an AI focus. The company developes technologies that can track the movement of image, face, wrist, foot or other body parts on the web in real-time. Kivisense also builds the WebAR authoring platform, Kivicube, where users can create AR scenes in 5-mins without any programming skills. The rendering engine that Kivisense developed is based on WebGL and the company fully supports glTF standards. The company has supported more than 1 billion AR scanning interactions in 2020. Key customers and partners of the company include Ernst & Young, Kering Group, LVMH Group, JD, IFS, PetroChina, China Tobacco, TTDEYE and many others.

LunarG’s Vulkan SDK and Ecosystem Survey for 2020 have been tabulated and are now available. LunarG conducts an annual survey of the Vulkan developer community to collect feedback on the health of the SDK and ecosystem. LunarG has summarized the results and created a report to share the key findings along with steps planned to improve the Vulkan SDK and ecosystem in 2021.

The OpenXR standard is now poised to become the foundation for the future of spatial multi-apps. Beyond creating a more unified way of connecting headsets and runtimes together, extensions are being added to facilitate these overlays and multi-app capabilities. As more of tools exist and seamlessly run alongside each other, new opportunities arise for developers to create experiences that leverage them.

In this new multi-app ecosystem companies like Dopl Technologies can focus on developing the applications that enable their remote robotic surgery use-case. Instead of having to build out everything themselves, they are able to rely on other applications like Pluto to provide the communication layer. Separating each of these functions gives developers the ability to focus on their specific use-case, instead of having to re-implement the wheel every time they build a new app.

xVision has released an update to version 2.00, which brings full compatibility with version 11.51 of X-Plane and the Vulkan API.

The xVision utility enables the user to manipulate shaders and alter the way X-Plane’s visual enhancements appear. Users of xVision 1.X would have noticed that when using the Vulkan API to render visuals, many of the shaders had little to no effect on X-Plane and their experience. With 2.00, xVision now supports shader tweaks for both Vulkan and OpenGL.

At CES 2021, HERE Technologies announced its release of HERE Premier 3D Cities, high-fidelity 3D models of 75 city centers around the world, with the goal of enabling transformative augmented reality applications, from supply chain management to vehicle navigation.

To deliver high-resolution 3D geometry over the web, HERE chose to use OGC’s “future-proof” 3D Tiles standard, originally created by Cesium and leveraging The Khronos Group glTF open standard. HERE’s 3D cities demonstrate that Khronos Group and OGC standards are successfully enabling the 3D graphics and 3D geospatial communities to achieve scaling, performance, and interoperability. 3D Tiles and glTF also enable HERE cities to include data layers and attributes aligned to physical geometry and terrain, and each structure is indexed and addressable, with accurate volume size, elevation, and color.

Panfrost, the open source driver for Arm Mali Midgard & Bifrost GPUs now provides non-conformant OpenGL ES 3.0 on Bifrost and desktop OpenGL 3.1 on Midgard. Panfrost’s desktop OpenGL support is native, reducing CPU overhead. Applications can now make use of the hardware’s hidden features, like explicit primitive restart indices, alpha testing, and quadrilaterals.

Today, the functionality of the Vulkan SDK gets a major upgrade for Vulkan developers targeting Apple platforms. LunarG is now shipping Device Simulation (DevSim) and Validation layers for the Vulkan SDK on macOS in addition to Linux and Windows. DevSim layers enable Vulkan application development on a highly-capable development system by “simulating” a less-capable target Vulkan implementation through constraining the reported features and resources on the more-capable platform. Validation layers verify that applications are correctly using the reported Vulkan functionality. The validation layers and associated Vulkan loader on macOS also now support Apple Silicon via Universal Binaries.

NVIDIA 460.32.03 Linux driver includes: Vulkan ray-tracing in KHR form, NVIDIA RTX A6000 series support, Reverse PRIME Bypass, various other new Vulkan extensions added, VDPAU video acceleration improvements, experimental S0ix suspend-to-idle support, and many bug fixes.

WebGL recently held an engaging and informative virtual WebGL Meetup. Co-organizer of the event, Damon Hernandez, led the discussion and kicked off the meeting by having the Chair of WebGL, Ken Russell, give an update on the latest WebGL progress along with some “Cool WebGL Stuff.” After the update, guest speakers from Google, Sketchfab, BlackSmithSoft, xeolabs.com, Playcanvas, Unfolded and Microsoft gave individual updates on WebGL implementations.

At the end of the Meetup, the audience submitted questions for the speakers during a live Q&A. As this dialogue benefits the whole community, we’re sharing the answers in this blog.

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