ATI 3D Developer Days October 19-20 in SF to feature sessions on developing for handhelds using OpenGL ES

ATI 3D Developer Days run October 19-20 in San Francisco ($150 registration). The sessions focus on the latest tools and SDKs for creating visually compelling 3D content using ATI SDKs, tools and media processors. Sessions of interest to handheld developers:

• Optimizing Handheld Games for ATI’s IMAGEON 2300 - focuses on optimizations for this full-featured, OpenGL ES-accelerated 3D hardware solution for mobile phones.
• ATI’s Handheld SDK - explains how developers can get the most out of ATI’s latest Handheld products.
• OpenGL ES - by Dan Ginsburg discusses how OpenGL ES 2.0 introduces the majority of the functionality used by today's desktop games into the embedded space and the major impact it will have on mobile game developers. While OpenGL ES 2.0 ushers in the shader era to mobile gaming, it also means that mobile game developers will need to make significant changes to their applications.
• Qualcomm Gaming Road Map - presents QUALCOMM's MSM chipset roadmap for graphics (OpenGL ES for 3D), audio and location based technologies for gaming

Firefox 1.5 (alpha 2) adds new HTML element for programmable graphics, with OpenGL ES-based 3D context likely

The open source Firefox Web browser continues to grow in popularity. The new Firefox 1.5 Alpha 2 release includes a new HTML element for programmable graphics. It can be used for rendering graphs, UI elements, and other custom graphics on the client. It is likely that a 3D context based on OpenGL ES will eventually be added to the specification. Read More

New Dell X51v handheld supports OpenGL ES using PowerVR MBX

The new high-end Dell Axim X51v handheld running Windows Mobile 5.0 uses a Intel 2700G multimedia accelerator with 16MB video memory. The multimedia accelerator incorporates the PowerVR MBX IP core with support for OpenGL ES 1.0. The PowerVR MBX OpenGL ES SDKs include documentation, source code, demos and tools that allows developers to create applications using the OpenGL ES 1.0 API. Read More

Fathammer to develop OpenGL ES-accelerated games for South Korea’s KTF Gpang game portal

Fathammer, a leading publisher and developer of 3D mobile game technologies (X-Forge) and games, will develop 5 new OpenGL ES-accelerated advanced 3D mobile games for the KTF "GPANG" game portal. KTF is one of the largest mobile phone operators in South Korea and accelerated 3D gaming will get many users hooked to KTF’s Gpang. The games will take advantage of OpenGL ES hardware acceleration on LG 3600 Gpang phones, and will run without hardware acceleration on earlier generation Gpang phones. Read More

OpenGL ES Safety Critical API gains momentum with new members Diehl Avionik and Zandiant Technologie

Diehl Avionik Systeme (think Airbus and large military aviation programs) and Zandiant Technologies, a leading supplier in automotive navigation and telematics systems have become Khronos Contributing Members with a focus on OpenGL SC. Rapidly-emerging markets that require OpenGL SC 1.0 include: cutting-edge automotive instrumentation; avionics displays that must pass the FAA-mandated DO-178B certification process; industrial applications such as power plant instrumentation, transportation monitoring and control; and real-time display of medical data requiring 100% reliability for surgery. While these industries have traditionally relied on proprietary subset definitions of OpenGL, manufacturers are now demanding open standard solutions to reduce development costs and shorten product development times. Also Princess Interactive has become an OpenGL ES Adopter in order to port their INSIDES V4.0 HMI-virtual prototyping/virtual cockpit system to OpenGL ES. Read More

Hybrid’s OpenGL ES “Rasteroid” implementation available for BREW platform

Hybrid Rasteroid OpenGL ES 1.0 and 1.1 (Common profile) can be used for evaluation and non-commercial application development. The new BREW 2.x and 3.x extensions are available to developers for evaluation. Read More

IBC2005 Press Conference presentation overviews the latest on the Khronos API and Tools family (5.3 MB pdf)

This presentation from the IBC2005 press briefing overviews the Khronos family of APIs and Tools of royalty-free platform for media acceleration. In addition to the technical and strategy material about OpenGL ES, OpenML, OpenMAX, OpenVG, Collada and OpenSL ES, the press conference was also an opportunity for demonstrations of OpenGL ES on OMAP2 from Texas Instruments (multiple engines for parallel processing on your handset which lets you play OpenGL ES 3D games on your mobile device with diplay on a TV) , and of the new MTIS alexVG OpenVG 1.0 software implementation for the ARM & XScale Platforms (Windows and Linux). Read More

MTIS to show alexVG vector graphics software engine using OpenVG 1.0

alexVG is the first commercial software engine based on the OpenVG 1.0 API, The high performance rendering pipeline offers complete support for paths, images, paint, blending, transformation, and image filters. Uses include SVG viewers, electronic maps, e-books, graphic user interfaces, and games. MTIS will demonstrate alexVG at the Khronos Press Conference at IBC2005, 12 September 2005. Read More

Jonathan Page of Sonaptic discusses JSR-234 and 3D audio for mobile devices

JSR-234, known as "Advanced Multimedia Supplements API", adds a new and advanced set of mobile audio capabilities for J2ME devices, including 3D sound positioning, real time signal processing, radio tuner control and other features. This interview on Sonify.org with Jonathan Page of Sonaptic, discusses the potential for new applications of mobile audio using JSR-234 and the various features and implementations of the new specification. OpenSL ES will act as the hardware acceleration API for the audio features of JSR-234. Read More

Presentation from GDC Mobile Europe discusses how the Khronos APIs tie together to build a complete platform for embedded media acceleration

This presentation from August 30, GDC Mobile Europe gives an overview of the Khronos Embedded API family - a complete and coherent, royalty-free platform for media acceleration. For OpenGL ES in particular, a growing infrastructure of tools and platforms are creating the world’s largest opportunity for games developers. Already a large percentage of popular JSR 184 engines use OpenGL ES for hardware acceleration. But that there is an opportunity for platforms with native application support to offer significantly higher 2D/3D performance. Finally it discusses how Collada 1.4+ based tools will allow assets and shaders to be conditioned for real-time delivery - including adapting content specifically to the capability of different platforms without losing key asset data. Read More

OpenVG Technical Presentation from Siggraph 2005 (800 KB pdf)

The OpenVG technical presentation from Siggraph 2005 reviews the API pipeline and parameters. It covers rasterization, sissoring, masking, blending, dithering and image manipulation. Sample code is given for each. Read More

Hybrid’s OpenVG reference implementation binaries available for public download

Hybrid Graphics has released Win32 binaries of their OpenVG 1.0 Reference Implementation. The package includes the OpenVG DLL, header files and a sample project. This can be used for validation purposes but is not suitable for development use. Khronos Members can download the source files from the OpenVG Working Group Folder in the Members Only area. Read More

New developer message boards with daily or weekly digests and RSS subscriptions

To make it easier for developers and Khronos Members to work together on developing new OpenGL ES and OpenVG applications, we have added options for message board digests and RSS new feeds. Digests are email messages sent to you daily or weekly with summary of posting on your topics of interest. This means you don't have to explicitly visit this site to see what conversations are going on. RSS feeds provide the titles and summaries for recent topic posting in each message board. Using any RSS savvy web browser or news reader you can scan posting from several message boards in one window, be notified when there are new postings, and use a bookmark to search postings for specific terms. Read More

COLLADA v1.4 presentation from Siggraph 2005 covers Collada DOM, Collada FX, Collada Physics, conformance testing and reconfigurable production pipelines

COLLADA is an interchange format between content creation and 3D processing tools that can be used to create a production pipeline. The Collada presentation from Siggraph 2005 is a comprehensive overview of what Collada does, what it is used for and how it works. The presentation also gives information about the upcoming Collada v1.4 including Collada FX, Collada Physics, Conformance testing, and reconfigurable production pipelines using the Collada DOM with Asset Tags and Conditioners.

• Collada FX allows interchange of complex, multi-pass shader effects, for multiple platforms, for both fixed-function (e.g. OpenGL ES 1.X) and programmable-pipelines (e.g. OpenGL ES 2.X)
• Collada Physics provides an API independent description of basic rigid body and jointed models including collision bounds, and sence partitioning
• The Collada Conformance Suite ensures that developers create reliable, high quality exporters and importers for all DCC applications
• The Collada DOM offers a way to read, write and validate files, handle asset management and develop Conditioners (modules to process subsets of 3D assets) to create a framework that allows users to reconfigure their own production pipelines using standard tools

Programmable Mali200 2D/3D/Video IP rasterizer core delivers PC quality graphics on mobile devices using OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenVG

Falanx Microsystems announced their new Mali200, a fully programmable graphics and media acceleration core for mobile phones that will take full advantage of OpenGL ES 2.0. It offers sophisticated 3D graphics that go beyond Shader Model 3.0, along with advanced DSP and general multimedia acceleration via OpenGL ES and OpenVG. It uses a single-pipeline 2D/3D/Video IP rasterizer core to deliver 2D/3D acceleration, 16X Full Scene Anti-Aliasing, smart texture filtering & compression and 30fps video recording and playback. Mali200 is designed for use in any multimedia device requiring high performance and low power, such as mobile phones, personal media players and laptops. This scalability is further enhanced with support for OpenGL ES 2.0, which is designed to bring desktop quality OpenGL to set-top boxes, auto navigation systems and even state-of-the-art game consoles such as the PLAYSTATION 3. In a related announcement, Falanx will work with Zoran Corporation to deliver the Mali technologies to mobile phones in the second half of 2006. Read More