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.
The Khronos Group - Connecting Software to Silicon
The Khronos Group is a not for profit industry consortium creating open standards for the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics, dynamic media, computer vision and sensor processing 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 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: fixed function hardware offering acceleration, image quality and performance. OpenGL ES 2.X: enables full programmable 3D graphics.
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 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™ 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
glTF - runtime asset format for WebGL, OpenGL ES, and OpenGL
The "glTF" project aims to define a final stage OpenGL Transmission Format to enable rapid delivery and loading of 3D content by WebGL, OpenGL, and OpenGL ES APIs. glTF together with COLLADA comprise a standards-based content pipeline for rich 3D web and mobile applications. glTF Specification is a work-in-progress from the COLLADA Working Group; it is not an official Khronos-ratified specification yet. It is incomplete and subject to change. The draft specification and related converters and loaders are available on github.
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
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.
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.
OpenVX - Hardware acceleration for Computer Vision applications & 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 OpenVX 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 OpenVX API can accelerate high-level libraries, such as OpenCV open source vision library, or be used by applications directly. A strong focus 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. OpenVX will explore interoperability with existing Khronos standards for camera control, video processing, compute acceleration and graphics rendering.
Chapters - Community driven regional meetup groups
Chapters host all kinds of Khronos technology-related events, from casual meet ups and socials to hack fests, fundraisers, guest lectures, community service and educational events.
August 5th, 2009 • Comments •
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AMD has uploaded a great video to YouTube showing the potential behind OpenCL. This AMD demo shows how easily Powder Toy physics simulation scales across 24-cores with OpenCL without making any changes to the application itself.
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AMD announced it is now offering a free OpenCL™ for CPU beta download as part of the ATI Stream SDK v2.0 Beta Program. The beta will help programmers to more easily develop parallel software programs and take further advantage of multi-core x86 CPUs to accelerate software and deliver a better computing experience. AMD has submitted conformance logs from its Microsoft® Windows® and Linux® CPU beta releases to the Khronos Working Group for certification.
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BetaNews has published a well thought out review based on the recent announcement of WebGL. Scott Fulton writes "For three-and-a-half years, the rotating cube corner has pretty much been the 'test pattern' for WebGL. But today's endorsement by the Khronos Group, responsible for OpenGL and OpenGL ES, could catapult this project from virtual stagnation into overdrive." There is also a good comment discussion on going. If you wish to comment directly to the developers of WebGL, you can do so on the Official Khronos WebGL Feedback thread.
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The Khronos Group has started an Official WebGL feedback thread. Express your opinions and mingle with those that are behind the creation of this new Javascript binding. You can find the WebGL feedback thread here.
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The Khronos Group has a nice OpenGL and OpenGL Shader Language Quick Reference Card for OpenGL 3.2 and GLSL 1.5. You can download the OpenGL Quick Reference Card in PDF format today from the Khronos OpenGL spec page.
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TechReport recently spoke with Neil Trevett about OpenCL, who fills positions as both the Khronos Group's President and Nvidia's VP of Embedded Content.This two page report is well written and an easy read.
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The Khronos Group, today announced more details on its new WebGL™ working group for enabling hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in Web pages without the need for browser plug-ins. The WebGL working group is defining a JavaScript binding to OpenGL® ES 2.0 to enable rich 3D graphics within a browser on any platform supporting the OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics standards.
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AMD just published a public OpenCL Beta for the CPU, soon to be followed with support for AMD’s latest GPUs. OpenCL is a young technology and there are few documents that provide a basic introduction with examples. This article, by Benedict Gaster from AMD, helps make OpenCL easier to understand and implement.
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SIO2 Interactive has released version 1.4 of its Open Source Game Engine. With an impressive list of new features the core has gone though a major optimization and now perform up to 40% faster! The SIO2_SDK comes with a set of 20 tutorials, video tutorials, documentation and online support.
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Open Asset Import Library is a free library to import various well-known 3D model formats into applications. The library has been designed for maximum stability and efficiency. Written in C++, it is licensed under the BSD license. The API is provided for both C and C++, ports for other languages like Java, C# and Python are in preparation. Among many other formats supported, COLLADA is also supported.
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The Champion the 3D Web using COLLADA Contest is over. The winner will be announced at Siggraph 2009 during the COLLADA BOF. Schedule details can be found on the Khronos Group Siggraph event page.
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Graphic Remedy, a leading provider of advanced solutions for 3D-graphics developers, today announced gDEBugger iPhone release. gDEBugger iPhone allows OpenGL ES® based application developers to deliver more-complex 3D-graphics apps and significantly improve rendering performance. gDEBugger iPhone offers advanced debugging and profiling capabilities that reduce development time and accelerate time to market.
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The Khronos Group today released OpenGL 3.2, the third major update in twelve months to the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API for personal computers and workstations. This new release continues the rapid evolution of the OpenGL standard to enable graphics developers to portably access cutting-edge GPU functionality across diverse operating systems and platforms. The full press release is available online, and the full specification is available for immediate download at http://www.opengl.org/registry. The Official OpenGL 3.2 discussion thread is now available on OpenGL.org.
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