The Khronos Group - Media Authoring and Acceleration

The Khronos Group is a not for profit industry consortium creating open standards for the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge 3D platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

OpenGL - The Industry Standard for High Performance Graphics

OpenGL® is the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API in the industry, bringing thousands of applications to a wide variety of computer platforms. It is window-system and operating-system independent as well as network-transparent. OpenGL enables developers of software for PC, workstation, and supercomputing hardware to create high-performance, visually compelling graphics software applications, in markets such as CAD, content creation, energy, entertainment, game development, manufacturing, medical, and virtual reality. OpenGL exposes all the features of the latest graphics hardware.

OpenCL - The open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems

OpenCL™ is the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices. OpenCL (Open Computing Language) greatly improves speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications in numerous market categories from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software.

OpenGL ES - The Standard for Embedded 3D Graphics

OpenGL® ES is a royalty-free, cross-platform API for full-function 2D and 3D graphics on embedded systems - including consoles, phones, appliances and vehicles. It consists of well-defined subsets of desktop OpenGL, creating a flexible and powerful low-level interface between software and graphics acceleration. OpenGL ES includes profiles for floating-point and fixed-point systems and the EGL™ specification for portably binding to native windowing systems. OpenGL ES 1.X is for fixed function hardware and offers acceleration, image quality and performance. OpenGL ES 2.X enables full programmable 3D graphics. OpenGL SC is tuned for the safety critical market.

EGL - Native Platform Interface

EGL™ is an interface between Khronos rendering APIs such as OpenGL ES or OpenVG and the underlying native platform window system. It handles graphics context management, surface/buffer binding, and rendering synchronization and enables high-performance, accelerated, mixed-mode 2D and 3D rendering using other Khronos APIs.

WebGL - OpenGL ES 2.0 for the Web

WebGL is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that brings OpenGL ES 2.0 to the web as a 3D drawing context within HTML, exposed as low-level Document Object Model interfaces. It uses the OpenGL shading language, GLSL ES, and can be cleanly combined with other web content that is layered on top or underneath the 3D content. It is ideally suited for dynamic 3D web applications in the JavaScript programming language, and will be fully integrated in leading web browsers.

WebCL - Heterogeneous parallel computing in HTML5 web browsers

The WebCL working group is working to define a JavaScript binding to the Khronos OpenCL standard for heterogeneous parallel computing. WebCL will enable web applications to harness GPU and multi-core CPU parallel processing from within a Web browser, enabling significant acceleration of applications such as image and video processing and advanced physics for WebGL games. WebCL is being developed in close cooperation with the Web community and has the potential to extend the capabilities of HTML5 browsers to accelerate computationally intensive and rich visual computing applications.

COLLADA - Digital Asset and FX Exchange Schema

COLLADA™ defines an XML-based schema to make it easy to transport 3D assets between applications - enabling diverse 3D authoring and content processing tools be combined into a production pipeline. The intermediate language provides comprehensive encoding of visual scenes including: geometry, shaders and effects, physics, animation, kinematics, and even multiple version representations of the same asset.COLLADA FX enables leading 3D authoring tools to work effectively together to create shader and effects applications and assets to be authored and packaged using OpenGL® Shading Language, Cg, CgFX, and DirectX® FX

OpenVG - The Standard for Vector Graphics Acceleration

OpenVG™ is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that provides a low-level hardware acceleration interface for vector graphics libraries such as Flash and SVG. OpenVG is targeted primarily at handheld devices that require portable acceleration of high-quality vector graphics for compelling user interfaces and text on small screen devices - while enabling hardware acceleration to provide fluidly interactive performance at very low power levels.

OpenSL ES - The Standard for Embedded Audio Acceleration

OpenSL ES™ is a royalty-free, cross-platform, hardware-accelerated audio API tuned for embedded systems. It provides a standardized, high-performance, low-latency method to access audio functionality for developers of native applications on embedded mobile multimedia devices, enabling straightforward cross-platform deployment of hardware and software audio capabilities, reducing implementation effort, and promoting the market for advanced audio.

OpenMAX IL - The Standard for Media Library Portability

OpenMAX™ is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that provides comprehensive streaming media codec and application portability by enabling accelerated multimedia components to be developed, integrated and programmed across multiple operating systems and silicon platforms. The OpenMAX API will be shipped with processors to enable library and codec implementers to rapidly and effectively make use of the full acceleration potential of new silicon - regardless of the underlying hardware architecture.

OpenMAX AL - The Standard for Media Library Portability

StreamInput - Cross-platform advanced sensor processing and user interaction

The Khronos StreamInput working group is driving industry consensus to create a cross-platform API to enable applications to discover and use new generation sensors to create sophisticated user interactions. The new API will support a general-purpose framework for consistently handling advanced sensors such as depth cameras, touch screens and motion and orientation sensors as well as traditional input devices. StreamInput will provide flexible device discovery to enable an application to select and process high-level semantic input from low-level device capabilities, enabling significant innovations by sensor and device manufacturers while simplifying portable application development. The API will also provide system-wide sensor synchronization for advanced multi-sensor applications such as augmented reality, and will use Khronos’ proven extension mechanisms to enable new types of input devices to be easily added and supported.

Vision - Hardware acceleration API for Computer Vision applications and libraries

Computer vision has become an essential component of many modern applications including gesture tracking, smart video surveillance, automatic driver assistance, biometrics, computational photography, augmented reality, visual inspection, robotics and more. The Khronos vision working group has been formed to drive industry consensus to create a cross-platform API standard to enable hardware vendors to implement and optimize accelerated computer vision algorithms. The Khronos vision API can accelerate high-level libraries, such as the popular OpenCV open source vision library, or be used by applications directly. A strong focus of the working group will be on providing computer vision on mobile and embedded systems and enabling acceleration on a wide variety of computing architectures including CPUs, GPUs and DSPs. The vision API will also explore interoperability with existing Khronos standards for camera control, video processing, compute acceleration and graphics rendering.

Other Khronos Group APIs and Technologies

The Khronos Group manages other APIs and Technologies:

OpenGL SC - Safety Critical Profile
OpenMAX DL - The Standard for Media Library Portability
OpenKODE - Khronos Open Development Environment
OpenWF - The Standard for building composited windowing systems
OpenML - The Standard for Dynamic Media Authoring

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Developer Overview

The Khronos Group encourages widespread implementation and adoption of its compute, graphics and media standards. We invite any company, institution or individual to download and use the specifications and development resources to assist in integrating compute and graphics functionality into their hardware or software products. Khronos does not charge royalties to or require licensing by developers using any of its APIs in their own software products. However, implementers of Khronos APIs are strongly encouraged to become Khronos Adopters so that their API implementations may access Khronos' API conformance tests, use Khronos' trademarks, and be covered by the Khronos IP umbrella agreement.

Below is a comprehensive listing of all publicly available API specifications, errata, header files, SDKs, whitepapers, and manuals. More detailed information for each API is available on the web page for that API. Khronos Members have early access to all specifications at all levels of development.

Ratified and Public APIs

Once a Khronos embedded media authoring and acceleration API or tool has been ratified by the Work Groups and the Promoters, it becomes public for royalty free use by developers. A listing of Books, Open Source and Commercial Implementations, Tutorials, and Sample Code. The currently ratified APIS are:

Khronos API Registry

The Khronos API registry contains specifications, header files, extension specifications, enumerant and function registries, and other related documentation for Khronos APIs.

Developer Message Boards

Khronos Members may subscribe to any of the API mailing lists, attend face to face meetings, or join in telecoferences to influence or gain early access to any of the specifications. Non-members may participate by joining in the public message boards. The message boards are frequented by all of the API development engineers and architects.

Presentations Library

The Developer Library contains Khronos Lecture Series Presentations, Whitepapers, and Supporting Materials.

The Khronos Group - a non-profit industry consortium to develop, publish and promote open standard, royalty-free media authoring and acceleration standards for desktop and handheld devices, combined with conformance qualification programs for platform and device interoperability.

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