Khronos Group Delivers COLLADA Adopters Package & Conformance Tests

New conformance results determine COLLADA specification adherence for 3D applications

March 11, 2010 – Game Developer Conference, San Francisco – The Khronos Group (Beaverton, OR) today announced that the COLLADA™ 1.4 Adopters Package is complete and under final review prior to public release (anticipated in April, 2010).  The Adopters Package contains both conformance testing software and documentation intended to drive rapid evaluation, deployment and acceptance of the COLLADA specification in 3D content creation, and asset management software.

The COLLADA specification defines an XML-based schema to enable 3D authoring applications to freely exchange digital assets without loss of information, enabling multiple software packages to be combined into extremely powerful tool chains.  The COLLADA 1.4 Adopters Package and conformance tests are designed to provide distinct levels of conformance and specification adherence that informs users about the suitability of a software authoring environment for use in a COLLADA tool chain.

Three new levels of COLLADA compliance are offered in the Adopters Package: Baseline, Superior and Exemplary.  Baseline conformance establishes the lowest level of interoperability between applications within a tool-chain.  Superior and Exemplary conformance increases the level of interoperability with broader feature support and asset information preservation without transformation.  Exemplary software is suitable for the advanced processing and archiving of your valuable 3D assets.  Content creation tools can now be certified to provide a trusted chain for preserving 3D content for future usage, while utilizing the latest 3D modeling features.

Access to the COLLADA Adopters Package is available to any interested company by executing the Khronos COLLADA 1.4 Adopters Agreement.  The Adopters Program is intended to promote consistent implementations of the format by many vendors across multiple platforms and to create an objective definition of conformance for the specification.  The Adopters Package defines a peer-reviewed Conformance Testing Procedure by which conformant products may use the COLLADA trademark (available after paying a Conformance Test Submission Fee that covers the costs of development and maintenance of the Adopters Program).  Full details of the Adopters Agreement, the Adopters Package and the COLLADA Conformance Testing Procedure can be found at www.khronos.org/adopters.

“Autodesk® is dedicated to providing open solutions for digital entertainment creation,” said Stig Gruman, Autodesk Vice President, Digital Entertainment and Visual Communication.  “Today’s digital pipelines require ever greater flexibility to integrate a wide assortment of applications and drive production efficiency. Autodesk is proud to be a major contributor to the COLLADA Adopters Program and associated Conformance Test Suite development. This program will help tool developers ensure their products work well together.”

“IBM® is excited to see the availability of the COLLADA Conformance Test Suite,” said Neil Katz, Distinguished Engineer, Innovation Initiatives, IBM.  “As 3D content continues to become more important across industries as diverse as gaming, healthcare, transportation and financial services, interoperability will be a key factor in setting the pace for its acceptance.”

“Kanzi Solution for User Interfaces and graphical content creation applauds Khronos' COLLADA conformance testing,” said Arto Ruotsalainen, Technical Project Manager, Rightware. “This official testing procedure directly enhances Rightware's Kanzi™ Solution customer benefits by enabling them to select certified COLLADA compliant tools.”

“Yumetech and the COLLADA Working Group worked closely to create a conformance test suite that will help adopters and inform users of the quality of COLLADA implementations.  COLLADA has significant adoption and this suite will bring everyone together into one ecosystem for the COLLADA standard” noted Alan Hudson, President, Yumetech and the Web3D Consortium.  “The Khronos Adopters Program will encourage high-quality COLLADA implementations across multiple platforms, and we strongly encourage content developers and platform developers to seek out conformant products to minimize their development costs.”

Learn about COLLADA at Game Developer Conference March 11-13, 2010

Attend the COLLADA session at GDC to see developers present the latest cutting-edge DCC tools and applications for gaming, automation, 3D web and visualization and learn about the new COLLADA conformance framework. Also discover how COLLADA assets and tool chains fit naturally with WebGL's plugin-less acceleration of 3D on the web - and how the combination of COLLADA and WebGL provide a compelling 3D pipeline for 3D Web content creation and deployment.  Additionally, Khronos is offering sessions on OpenCL, OpenGL, and Mobile APIs.

All Khronos GDC Sessions are in Room 123, North Hall, Moscone Center, San Francisco:

OpenCL	Thursday, March 11	1:30pm – 2:30pm
OpenGL featuring WebGL	Thursday, March 11	3:00pm – 4:00pm
COLLADA featuring WebGL	Friday, March 12	1:30pm – 2:30pm
Mobile featuring WebGL	Friday, March 12	3:00pm – 4:00pm

About The Khronos Group

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, EGL™, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenKODE™ and COLLADA™.  All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at http://www.khronos.org. 

Khronos Unleashes Cutting-Edge, Cross-Platform Graphics Acceleration with OpenGL 4.0

Open standard 3D API specification available immediately; Provides performance, quality and flexibility enhancements including tessellation and double precision shaders; Tight integration with OpenCL for seamless visual computing

March 11, 2010 – San Francisco, GDC 2010 –The Khronos™ Group today announced the release of the OpenGL® 4.0 specification; a significant update to the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API (application programming interface) that is deployed on all major desktop operating systems.  OpenGL 4.0 brings the very latest in cross-platform graphics acceleration and functionality to personal computers and workstations and the OpenGL standard serves as the basis for OpenGL® ES, the graphics standard on virtually every shipping smart phone.  

The OpenGL 4.0 specification has been defined by the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) working group at Khronos, and includes the GLSL 4.00 update to the OpenGL Shading language in order to enable developers to access the latest generation of GPU acceleration with significantly enhanced graphics quality, acceleration performance and programming flexibility.  This new release continues the rapid evolution of the royalty-free OpenGL standard to enable graphics developers to portably access cutting-edge GPU functionality across diverse operating systems and platforms. The full specification is available for immediate download at http://www.opengl.org/registry .

OpenGL 4.0 further improves the close interoperability with OpenCL™ for accelerating computationally intensive visual applications.  OpenGL 4.0 also continues support for both the Core and Compatibility profiles first introduced with OpenGL 3.2, enabling developers to use a streamlined API or retain backwards compatibility for existing OpenGL code, depending on their market needs.

OpenGL 4.0 has been specifically designed to bring significant benefits to application developers, including:

• two new shader stages that enable the GPU to offload geometry tessellation from the CPU;
• per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shader input positions for increased rendering quality and anti-aliasing flexibility;
• drawing of data generated by OpenGL, or external APIs such as OpenCL, without CPU intervention;
• shader subroutines for significantly increased programming flexibility;
• separation of texture state and texture data through the addition of a new object type called sampler objects;
• 64-bit double precision floating point shader operations and inputs/outputs for increased rendering accuracy and quality;
• performance improvements, including instanced geometry shaders, instanced arrays, and a new timer query.

Lastly, Khronos has simultaneously released an OpenGL 3.3 specification, together with a set of ARB extensions, to enable as much OpenGL 4.0 functionality as possible on previous generation GPU hardware; providing maximum flexibility and platform coverage for application developers.  The full OpenGL 3.3 specification is also available for immediate download at http://www.opengl.org/registry

“The release of OpenGL 4.0 is a major step forward in bringing state-of-the-art functionality to cross-platform graphics acceleration, and strengthens OpenGL’s leadership position as the epicenter of 3D graphics on the web, on mobile devices as well as on the desktop,” said Barthold Lichtenbelt, OpenGL ARB working group chair and senior manager Core OpenGL at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA is pleased to announce that its upcoming Fermi-based graphics accelerators will fully support OpenGL 4.0 at launch.”

“AMD sees the release of OpenGL 4.0 as another major accomplishment for the OpenGL ARB,” said Ben Bar-Haim, vice president of design engineering at AMD.  “AMD contributes to the Khronos workgroups, and we consistently find that Khronos is successful at developing healthy, thriving, and evolving open standards such as OpenGL and OpenCL.”

“OpenGL 4.0 continues the ARB’s schedule-driven roll-out of new functionality, and this significant major release enables developers to access leading-edge GPU functionality across multiple platforms with full backwards compatibility,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president at NVIDIA.  “OpenGL continues to be a keystone in the Khronos API ecosystem, through driving innovation into OpenGL ES and WebGL™ to bring high-performance programmable graphics to mobile platforms and the Web, and by interoperating with OpenCL to create a seamless visual and compute platform for application developers.”

Learn about OpenGL 4.0 and Khronos APIs at Game Developer Conference Room 123, North Hall, Moscone Center, San Francisco:

OpenCL	Thursday, March 11	1:30PM – 2:30PM
OpenGL featuring WebGL	Thursday, March 11	3:00PM – 4:00PM
COLLADA featuring WebGL	Friday, March 12	1:30PM – 2:30PM
Mobile featuring WebGL	Friday, March 12	3:00PM – 4:00PM

About The Khronos Group

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, EGL™, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenKODE™ and COLLADA™.  All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at http://www.khronos.org . 

ALT and CARERI establish joint technology lab for new generation of embedded graphics display systems

ALT Software to provide AMD ATI Radeon E4690 (M96) and X1400 (M54) embedded OpenGL graphics libraries & technical support services to support the launch of CARERI’s Critical Embedded Graphics Technology Lab for the advancement of avionics display technologies.

Toronto, ON, February 16, 2010 - ALT Software announced today that it has won a contract with the Chinese Aeronautical Radio Electronics Research Institute (CARERI) to provide embedded graphics display drivers and hardware design services for the AMD ATI Radeon E4690 (M96) and Radeon X1400 (M54) graphics processors for deployment in next-generation avionics display systems. CARERI is a leading provider of avionics products and services to China’s aerospace industry. The Institute recently opened a Centre of Excellence in Shanghai known as the Critical Embedded Graphics Technology Lab. The Lab has been established for the advancement of avionics graphics display technologies and will be leveraging ALT’s products and expertise as part of their research and development mandate. ALT Software has been a leading provider of OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC (Safety Critical) display drivers for avionics systems for well over a decade. Their products are currently used in many of the world’s most advanced commercial and military aircraft.

This new relationship was brokered by Coordinate, a strategic partner and Value Added Reseller (VAR) with operations in China. "CARERI is a world-class leader in the field of avionics research, and ALT Software is a world-class leader in the field of embedded graphics for avionics systems," said Betty Li, Director of Business Development of Coordinate. "Coordinate is very pleased to be acting as the bridge between these two reputable organizations, thereby furthering the advancement of avionics display technologies in Chinese aircraft."

"Embedded graphics display technologies have experienced enormous performance improvements over the past few years, especially with the advent of high performance processors like AMD’s ATI Radeon E4690 and X1400," said Wang Guo Qing, President of CARERI. "These advances have inspired CARERI to create a Critical Embedded Graphics Technology Lab with the goal of leveraging these sorts of technologies to improve a pilot’s situational awareness in the cockpit. We selected ALT Software as our primary technology partner for this endeavor because of their impressive history of delivering high performance embedded graphics display solutions to the world’s leading aircraft manufacturers and systems integrators."

"We’re really excited about this new opportunity to work with CARERI," said Darryl Parisien, President of ALT Software. "China offers a wealth of business development opportunities and we consider this relationship to be a strategic milestone in our evolution as a global provider of embedded graphics software to the aerospace industry. We’re looking forward to working with CARERI to bring cutting edge graphics technology to China’s next-generation aircraft."

About ALT Software Inc.
ALT Software is the world’s leading supplier of advanced 2D/3D graphics, safety critical and OpenGL enabling solutions for embedded systems.

The company provides OpenGL ES, OpenGL SC and OpenVG graphics drivers for SoCs and discrete GPUs from AMD, Fujitsu, Intel, Imagination Technologies, Texas Instruments, Freescale, and others. ALT’s customizable high-performance 2D/3D embedded graphics drivers support a variety of real time operating systems (RTOS) and a range of system configurations.

From display drivers for the ATI Radeon E4690, AMD’s latest high-performance embedded computing GPU, to an OpenGL 1.1/SC software-based graphics renderer, ALT’s products support the full spectrum of high to low-end graphics requirements of various embedded systems. Their software is designed for deployment in aerospace and defense systems as well as in automotive, medical, industrial, and consumer devices.

About CARERI
CARERI is a specialized research institution for the research and development of integrated avionics systems and core equipment in China. It is mainly engaged in the development, manufacture and management of avionics and civil electronic technology and products as well as software.

 

Rightware Debuts Kanzi™ Cross-platform User Interface Solution at Mobile World Congress

User interfaces designed with Kanzi solution work in multiple different operating systems and embrace rich 3D graphics to provide better user experience and eye-popping visuals

Espoo, Finland -- February 2, 2010. Rightware will demonstrate ‘Mobile App Store’ application running in various mobile devices at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona from February 15th through February 18th. Mobile App Store is designed and implemented using Kanzi user interface solution that enables designers to quickly have their applications running in different target devices.

Key advantage of the Kanzi solution is “design-once, deploy everywhere” cross-platform support for the leading mobile operating systems, including Android, Blackberry, Linux, Maemo, Moblin, iPhone OS, Palm Web OS, Symbian OS, and Windows Mobile. Kanzi solution is build on top of industry standard OpenGL ES graphics API.

In terms of designer’s work flow, Kanzi provides the missing link between today’s leading 3D graphics content creation tools, such as 3DS Max, Maya and Softimage on the one hand, and cell phones on the other hand. Artists can easily export their designs from these software packages to Kanzi SDK using COLLADA data format. Designers then rapidly compose the actual user interface application and apply all 3D graphics effects within the Kanzi SDK itself. The tool features a desktop runtime of the Kanzi engine to bring a real-time view of the final application at the desktop. This feature eliminates the need to continuously build the project to target device during development in order to inspect it. Therefore, design cycle shortens substantially while the designer is better able to realize her vision.

Kanzi runtime can be integrated to a wide variety of target devices, even those with different operating systems and hardware architectures. Applications made with Kanzi SDK will execute properly in all these devices, thus giving greater return on investment for the application developer.

Kanzi features a unified pipeline for OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenGL ES 1.x based 3D graphics. The engine supports real-time streaming of data, texture and fragment shaders, multi-texturing and dynamic lighting. There is also a versatile animation framework supporting key frame animations, such as vertex, object and bone based animations.

Rightware will exhibit at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona from February 15th through 18th. The booth is located in Hall 1, 1E19. Interested companies and media are encouraged to book an appointment for a full hands-on demonstration by emailing a meeting request to sales@rightware.com.

More information about Kanzi, screenshots and videos are available at Rightware’s web site: http://www.rightware.com/kanzi.

Symbio Delivers Extensive OpenWF Conformance Test Suite and Conformant Sample Implementation to Khronos Group

Empowers Rapid and Effective Uptake of OpenWF Standard

BEIJING, China, SAN JOSE, Calif., USA and TAMPERE, Finland – January 25, 2010 – Symbio, a leader in next generation outsourced product development (OPD), today announced it has completed and delivered the OpenWF™ conformance test suite and a conformant OpenWF sample implementation to the Khronos Group industry consortium.  The Khronos Group is a 100+ member-funded association committed to creating open standards that enable the authoring and acceleration of graphics and dynamic media on a variety of platforms and devices.  Symbio’s highly experienced team and deep domain expertise in test, design and development of converging technologies provided the necessary skill set to contribute to the OpenWF specifications.  The conformance test suite is now available to Khronos members and the sample implementation is available to industry members as open source.

The OpenWF 1.0 Standard, released in November, is a key system-level enabler for graphics IP vendors, hardware manufacturers and device manufacturers that enables the integration of individual components and APIs for an overall enhanced user interface experience.  An operating system-independent and hardware-neutral foundation for building windowing systems and providing display control functionality in accelerated mobile and embedded devices, OpenWF enables a new degree of portability, acceleration and abstraction for windowing systems, while adding functionality and features through close integration with Khronos application APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). 

Through its contract with Khronos to provide the conformance test suite and conformant sample implementation, Symbio, a Contributing Member of the Khronos Group, makes it possible for OpenWF adopters to take the next step from reviewing and testing their platforms and devices to adopting and implementing the standard.

The conformance test suite verifies compliance with the OpenWF specifications and provides an assessment of visual quality.  OpenWF implementers benefit from reduced costs associated with developing in-house testing infrastructure and users now have a guarantee of quality when using compliant implementations.  The sample implementation provides implementers concrete examples and helps to resolve questions regarding intended behavior.

"We are delighted that Symbio completed the OpenWF proof of concept validation so quickly, and efficiently provided a robust and rigorous conformance test empowering the rapid and effective uptake of the OpenWF standard,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group.  “We are very pleased with the quality delivered and the unique expertise Symbio has provided.  Through its progressive training, design, integration, implementation and testing services, Symbio is a valuable contributor to advancing and strengthening the Khronos ecosystem.”

“The OpenWF standard speeds the introduction of high efficiency video and graphics functionality into a wide range of platforms and devices, accelerating time to market,” said Jarkko Kemppainen, director, Technology Solutions, at Symbio.  “The Khronos OpenWF sample implementation and conformance test suite enables companies to fully embrace the benefits of OpenWF with confidence.”

"Symbio were central to the sample implementation and conformance test suite and sample implementation for OpenWF 1.0.," said Pete Wilson, OpenWF Working Group chairman and ARM Media Processing Division.  "Execution of the contract to implement the whole system was exemplary, with Symbio’s expertise and flexibility ensuring a high-quality, timely and low-cost delivery." 

About Symbio
Symbio designs and develops feature-rich products for companies embracing transformational advances in communications and technology. By leveraging its deep expertise in enterprise, embedded, mobile, Web-based and user experience driven technologies, Symbio enables its clients to focus on their core competencies while building mission-critical technologies and products to sustain, speed and secure the long-term success for the business. World-leading companies like China Mobile, IBM, Microsoft and Nokia already rely on Symbio for faster, innovative, and highly cost-effective IT outsourcing. With global headquarters in Beijing, China, San Jose, USA, and Tampere, Finland, Symbio is the outsourced product development partner companies trust to deliver truly integrated global reach with local touch. For more information about Symbio, visit www.symbio.com.

 

Vivante and Animated Media Partner to Offer Embedded Flash Solutions Optimized for Vivante OpenGL ES 2.0 Graphics Processors

Flash Tools Can Be Used to Create Browser-less Embedded Flash Applications that are Translated To OpenGL ES 2.0 and Rendered by the Vivante GPU

SUNNYVALE, Calif., and TORONTO, Jan. 20 /PRNewswire/—Vivante Corporation, a leader in consumer oriented 3D graphics processors, and Animated Media Inc. (AMI) are pleased to announce a collaborative relationship to offer AMI’s VGK platform, a collection of integrated software tools that extend Adobe’s Flash product functionality by allowing the technology to operate in a wide variety of systems, from low-power embedded devices to high-end 3D computers, for Vivante’s GPUs.  Pairing Vivante’s innovative ScalarMorphic GPU architecture with AMI’s VGK platform will enable sophisticated UI tools to be used in embedded systems such as cameras, mobile devices, games, eReaders, netbooks, Set Top Boxes (STBs), home entertainment products, and toys.  The VGK platform will be featured and performance tuned to Vivante’s GPUs giving a competitive advantage to Vivante’s licensees.

"Our customers are now asking for embedded Flash capabilities that can be easily scaled to meet the various display resolution requirements of their devices," said Wei-Jin Dai, Vivante President and CEO.  "Animated Media’s VGK platform allows stunning graphics and animations to be used on the small screens of mobile and handheld devices, and scaled to HD 1080p resolutions when connected to native or external displays.  Artists can now use well known tools for both fast prototyping and production of User Interfaces."

Chris Brady, CEO of Animated Media added, "We are pleased to be working with Vivante because they understand the need to leverage a GPU’s capabilities to accelerate Flash content.  The combination of Vivante’s OpenGL ES 2.0 accelerated pipeline and AMI’s VGK platform allows device manufacturers to use multiple Flash engines in parallel, and map Flash objects into a 3D environment."

About Vivante Corporation

Vivante is the fastest growing supplier of licensable GPU solutions with SoC vendors licensing GPUs for applications from Internet enabled HD 1080p home entertainment, automotive displays, mobile gaming, mobile computing, printer, office automation equipment, camera and smart phones. Vivante’s licenses have garnered design wins from top OEMs around the world enabling the next generation of convergence computing applications. Vivante delivers silicon-proven, low-power, high-performance graphics conformant with the DirectFB, and Khronos APIs OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1 and OpenVG 1.1 API standards to semiconductor solution providers.  Vivante GPU solutions fully support the Android platform, Adobe Flash 10.1 and a wide range of middleware and graphics applications.  The Vivante development environment is used by a worldwide network of application developers and ecosystem partners.  Vivante is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with an R&D center in Shanghai, China. For more information, visit http://www.vivantecorp.com.

About Animated Media Inc.

Animated Media Inc. (AMI) is based in Toronto, Canada and offers a family of multimedia software products that provide support for 2D/3D graphics, video, and audio applications using popular media formats such as Adobe Flash, SVG, and the Khronos Group’s Open APIs.  AMI’s VGK platform extends Adobe’s Flash product by providing additional "eye popping" 3D features to the Flash player in embedded environments.  AMI products support multiple vertical markets such as digital advertising, digital television, industrial control, 3D user interface authoring, internet and casino gaming, home automation controls, medical instrumentation, automotive control and infotainment displays, and digital cameras.  For more information, please visit us at http://www.animatedmedia.ca

 

Imagination Technologies announces POWERVR SGX545 graphics IP core with OpenGL 3.2 and OpenCL 1.0

New core takes mobile & embedded graphics family to a new level; delivers unrivalled capabilities

Las Vegas, USA, 8th January 2010: Imagination Technologies, a leading multimedia chip technologies company, announces POWERVR SGX545, the first and only DirectX10.1 capable embedded graphics IP core available for immediate licensing. SGX545 will also deliver OpenGL ES 2.x and OpenGL 3.2 to deliver class leading 3D graphics performance, and will also support OpenCL 1.0 full profile capability which will enable mobile and embedded applications to take maximum advantage of the capabilities offered by these GPU APIs for both 3D graphics and general purpose applications.

POWERVR SGX545 is available for licensing now. The IP is already proven in silicon in a test chip from Imagination and licensed by a lead partner.

Says Tony King-Smith, VP Marketing, Imagination: "Combining our many years of experience in the embedded, mobile and PC-based DirectX graphics worlds, POWERVR SGX 545 takes the possibilities of hand-held graphics to a new level by delivering a full DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 3.x feature set as well as delivering GPU powered OpenCL heterogeneous parallel processing capabilities for the mobile and embedded markets. This makes POWERVR SGX545 a compelling solution for application processor SoC designers targeting the next generation of netbook and MID mobile products demanding exceptional graphics capabilities."

The debut of POWERVR SGX545 reinforces the SGX family’s outstanding scalability which ranges from ultra-small OpenGL ES 2.0 mobile cores through solutions for feature-rich mobile and HDTV platforms, to high-performance gaming and computing solutions. The SGX family supports a wide range of APIs including DirectX9 & 10, OpenGL ES 2.x, OpenGL 3.x, OpenVG 1.x and OpenCL 1.x.

POWERVR SGX545 delivers real-world performance of 40 million polygons/sec and 1 Gpixels/sec fillrate at 200MHz,* and is capable of driving HD screens with ultra smooth high frame rate 3D graphics content.

New features in POWERVR SGX545 include:

• DirectX10.1 API support
• Enhanced support for DirectX10 Geometry Shaders
• DirectX10 Data assembler support (Vertex, primitive and instance ID generation)
• Render target resource array support
• Full arbitrary non power of two texture support
• Full filtering support for F16 texture types
• Support for all DirectX10 mandated texture formats
• Sampling from unresolved MSAA surfaces
• Support for Gamma on output pixels
• Order dependent coverage based AA (anti-aliased lines)
• Enhanced line rasterisation

SGX545 was also designed to deliver full profile OpenCL 1.0 capabilities, with advanced features including:

• Support of round-to-nearest for floating-point math
• Full 32-bit integer support (includes add, multiply and divide)
• 64-bit integer emulation
• 3D texture support
• Support for the maximum 2D and 3D image sizes specified in the full profile.

Inside POWERVR SGX545
USSE (Universal Scalable Shader Engine), the main programmable processing unit within each POWERVR SGX545 pipeline, is a scalable multi-threaded GPU shader processing engine that efficiently processes graphics as well as many other mathematically-intensive tasks. USSE can be programmed using the GLSL language that forms part of the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification, or in the C-based parallel processing language used in the OpenCL specification – both APIs from the Khronos Group.

POWERVR SGX545 delivers the broadest range of graphics API feature sets in the industry, while also enabling developers to gain greater access to the full capabilities of the USSE-powered GP-GPU in a broad range of applications including digital imaging, video processing, game physics, cryptography, and other general computing tasks that can benefit from parallel processing.

Editor's Notes
* All fill rate figures stated assuming a scene depth complexity of x2.5.

About Imagination Technologies
Imagination Technologies Group plc (LSE:IMG) – a global leader in multimedia and communication silicon technologies – creates and licenses market-leading processor cores for graphics, video, multi-threaded embedded processing/DSP and multi-standard communications applications. These silicon intellectual property (IP) solutions for systems-on-chip (SoC) are complemented by strong array of software tools and drivers as well as extensive developer and middleware ecosystems. Target markets include mobile phone, handheld multimedia, home consumer entertainment, mobile and low-power computing, and in-car electronics. Its licensees include many of the leading semiconductor and consumer electronics companies. Imagination has corporate headquarters in the United Kingdom, with sales and R&D offices worldwide. See: www.imgtec.com.

ALT Software wins multi-million dollar OpenGL ES and OpenVG contract

Embedded graphics leader to develop device drivers for POWERVR SGX graphics IP core in next-generation System on Chip processor designed for high performance in power constrained devices.

TORONTO, Canada - January 7th, 2010 - ALT Software announced today that it has been selected by a leading semiconductor manufacturer to develop a series of graphics drivers and custom software modules for their next-generation SoC processors targeted for use in low power embedded computing devices. The manufacturer’s identity and many other specific details cannot be revealed due to confidentiality agreements. ALT’s software will enable the SoC processor’s multimedia functions, including the POWER VR SGX graphics IP core, which provides high-performance graphics within the SoC, eliminating the need for a dedicated graphics chip.

ALT Software has been a leading provider of embedded OpenGL graphics drivers for well over a decade. Their products can be found in devices ranging from aircraft cockpit displays to automotive infotainment systems and handheld devices. This design win includes providing OpenGL ES 2.0 and Open VG 1.1 (which supports Macromedia Flash and other 2D graphics rendering functions) drivers for the next-generation SoC’s SGX graphics core. OpenGL ES is internationally recognized as the de facto 2D & 3D open-standard graphics API for embedded devices and is used in graphics intensive mobile applications such as advanced user interfaces, games, and 3D moving maps.

“This significant contract provides ALT with an opportunity to further expand our support for Imagination Technologies’ POWERVR graphics IP cores,” said Darryl Parisien, President of ALT Software. “Today’s low power mobile consumer devices such as netbooks and smartphones increasingly require advanced graphics features despite battery life constraints, continuously shrinking platforms, and falling retail costs. Imagination Technologies’ graphics IP cores have proven to be an excellent solution for semiconductor manufactures seeking to address these challenges by integrating support for high performance graphics directly into the CPU.”

“Imagination Technologies is delighted that ALT was selected as the provider of OpenGL and OpenVG driver software for what promises to be a very popular SoC,” said Peter McGuinness, Director of Business Development, of Imagination Technologies. “We are highly impressed with the expertise they have brought to the table with a number of POWERVR MBX and SGX based projects. This new software will leverage the many features of the fully programmable SGX IP core, such as Tile-Based Deferred Shading, as well as the impressive functionality offered by the OpenGL ES 2.0 and Open VG 1.1 specifications.”

ALT Software provides embedded OpenGL, OpenGL SC, OpenGL ES, and OpenVG drivers that address a wide range of performance requirements and support a variety of system configurations, CPU and GPU. ALT’s POWERVR graphics device drivers can be easily ported to real-time operating systems (RTOS) used in consumer devices and in mission-critical environments such as avionics displays, handheld devices, automotive dashboard displays, industrial controls, and life critical medical devices.

About ALT Software
  Established in 1994, ALT Software is the world’s leading supplier of 2D/3D graphics, safety-critical and OpenGL solutions for embedded systems. They specialize in the development of advanced graphics software solutions which are compliant with the highest industry practices and standards for OpenGL and OpenVG as defined by the Khronos Group, as well as internationally recognized standards for safety critical and life critical environments such as the FAA and JAA recognized DO178-B guideline for aircraft and FDA 501(k) guideline for medical devices.

 

Epic Games Leads Industry to Unreal Graphics on Your Phone

Epic becomes Khronos Promoter to ensure awesome 3D graphics 
can be brought to every desktop platform and mobile device

January 7, 2009 – CES (Las Vegas, NV) – The Khronos™ Group and Epic Games, Inc. today announced that Epic has joined Khronos, an industry consortium creating open graphical standards, as a member of its Board of Promoters. Khronos membership will enable Epic to provide significant input into the development and evolution of key graphics 3D standards, such as OpenGL® and OpenGL ES™, that enable Epic’s gaming technology on an increasingly broad range of platforms including desktop PCs, game consoles and mobile phones. As a Khronos Promoter member, Epic can participate and vote in any Khronos working group, and Epic’s seat on the Board of Promoters will allow it to direct Khronos strategy and play a pivotal role in the evolution of 3D graphics on mobile devices.

“Epic is one of the most respected games technology companies on the planet and Khronos is delighted to have their participation as we create the APIs that enable key gaming engines, such as Unreal Engine 3, to tap into the power of 3D GPU acceleration on a wide range of platforms,” said Neil Trevett, Khronos president and vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA. “Epic’s real-world experience and standing in the industry will enable them to bring enormous insight and influence to the evolution of the OpenGL and OpenGL ES specifications that will benefit the entire industry.”

“Epic welcomes the emergence of mobile platforms that are great candidates for Unreal Engine 3-powered games and applications, and we have joined the board of Khronos to have a seat at the table in determining how the major APIs for visually compelling mobile graphics will evolve over the next few years,” said Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games. “Our goal is to ensure that the functionality essential to bringing rich experiences to mobile users is enabled on both the hardware and software side of modern devices and platforms.”

About Epic Games
Epic Games, Inc., based in Cary, NC and established in 1991, develops cutting-edge games and cross-platform game engine technology. The company has created multiple million-selling, award-winning titles in its “Unreal” series, including “Unreal Tournament 3” for PC, PLAYSTATION®3 and Xbox 360®. Epic’s “Gears of War” won over 30 Game of the Year awards, and the sales of "Gears of War" and “Gears of War 2” have eclipsed 11 million units. Epic's Unreal Engine 3 is the three-time consecutive winner of Game Developer magazine’s Best Engine Front Line Award, was the 2008 Hall of Fame inductee and won Best Engine again in 2009. Unreal Engine 3 has also been recognized as the number one game engine by Develop magazine. Additional information about Epic can be obtained through the Epic Games Web site at http://www.epicgames.com.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards for authoring, accelerating and accessing visual computing. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenKODE™ and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at http://www.khronos.org.

Fixstars to Release Beta Version of "FOXC" OpenCL Compiler for x86

Source-to-source compiler for the multi-core environment

Tokyo, Japan - December 16, 2009 - Fixstars Corporation announced their release of the Beta Version of their OpenCL Compiler "FOXC" for the x86 architecture starting today. This will allow software developers to take full advantage of multi-core x86 CPUs to develop OpenCL-based softwares. The "FOXC" Beta version can be downloaded for free from their website. (Website: http://www.fixstars.com/en/foxc)

OpenCL is a parallel computing framework for programming multi-core systems, such as multi-core CPUs, GPUs, Cell/B.E., DSPs. The framework, which is a product of joint effort by the world’s leading semiconductor makers and hardware vendor, is attracting attention as an efficient and highly portable open technology for software development.

"FOXC" is a source-to-source compiler that takes OpenCL code as the input source. The output source file is a readable C code optimized to take advantage of the hardware architecture, which may be further hand-tuned. The FOXC Beta version being released today generates executable code for x86 multi-core CPUs, including optimizations using SSE instructions and multi-threading.

"In order to draw out the true performance capability of x86 multi-core CPUs, a mastery of SSE instructions and multi-threading is necessary, which is not an easy skill set to acquire," said Akihiro Asahara, the leader of the Software Platform Group within the Software Solution Division at Fixstars. "By using FOXC, anyone will be able to generate optimized code for x86 multi-core CPUs through OpenCL."

Fixstars will continue to improve "FOXC", while actively performing OpenCL Compiler Development Services using "FOXC" as the basis.

For more information on FOXC or to download FOXC:
http://www.fixstars.com/en/foxc

For more information on OpenCL Compiler Development Service:
http://www.fixstars.com/en/solutions/opencl/compiler.html

About Fixstars Corporation

Fixstars Corporation provides software technology solutions that target Cell/B.E. and GPU with a vision of the future where multi-core microprocessors are the standard. Fixstars enables the increase in performance of Multi-core based operations through provision of a complete, integrated ecosystem with specific turn-key products for Finance, Medical, Manufacturing, and Digital media markets.

For more information, visit www.fixstars.com/en

"Fixstars" and the Fixstars’ logo are registered trademarks of the Fixstars Corporation. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc., used under license by Khronos. Cell Broadband Engine, Cell/B.E. are trademarks of the Sony Computer Entertainment Corporation. All other company names and product names mentioned in the article are each company’s registered trademark, or a trademark.

 

ALT Software releases optimized OpenGL ES and OpenVG graphics drivers for the POWERVR MBX graphics core

POWERVR MBX is a popular lower-powered, high-performance graphics IP core integrated on many “system-on-a-chip” (SoC) processors used in automotive electronics such as instrument clusters, navigation systems and infotainment systems

Toronto, Canada, December 10, 2009. ALT Software announced today that it has developed OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenVG 1.1 graphics drivers for embedded computing devices that employ system-on-a-chip (SoC) processors with the Imagination Technologies POWERVR MBX graphics core on Wind River’s VxWorks and Wind River Linux operating systems. The MBX core provides hardware accelerated 2D/3D graphics within the SoC, and uses a unique tile-based rendering architecture that enables high performance and image quality in lower power environments. ALT’s MBX driver includes an ALT- exclusive integrated feature known as a TAR, or Target Area Renderer, which enables the MBX core to render graphics at frame rates as high as 60 frames per second (fps), which rivals desktop computer graphics performance. The driver currently supports the Freescale MPC5121e embedded processor. ALT is also supporting PowerVR MBX and PowerVR SGX graphics cores on the Texas Instruments OMAP 2, OMAP 3, Freescale’s i.MX31, and a number of other SoC processors.

“As a Wind River strategic partner, ALT Software has been providing reliable, high-performance embedded graphics drivers for operating systems for years. We’re excited to see ALT creating MBX drivers that target both our VxWorks RTOS and Wind River Linux,” said Franz Walkembach, Senior Manager, Automotive Solutions Marketing, Wind River

“The increased adoption of Wind River’s operating systems in automotive electronics such as telematics and infotainment units make them an excellent first target platform for ALT’s POWERVR graphics drivers,” said Dan Joncas, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, ALT Software.” As high-quality graphics and versatile functionality becomes a standard feature of these systems, the MBX core on a SoC like the MPC5121e presents itself as a cost effective solution that can last through an entire vehicle model’s life cycle, even as the application software is upgraded each year.”

About ALT Software

Established in 1994, ALT Software is the world’s leading supplier of advanced 2D/3D graphics, safety- critical and OpenGL solutions for embedded systems. They specialize in the development of advanced graphics software solutions which are compliant with the highest industry practices and standards for OpenGL as defined by Khronos Group, as well as FAA guidelines for safety-critical environments.

DMP adds OpenGL ES 2.0 shader-based graphics IP to its new “SMAPH®” graphics IP core family

“SMAPH-S” is the world’s smallest and most scalable OpenGL ES 2.0 IP core and sets a new benchmark for mobile to high performance computing devices.

Tokyo Japan, November 16th, 2009 – Digital Media Professionals Inc. (DMP hereafter), a world-class leader in 2D/3D graphics solutions, headquartered in Tokyo Japan, today announced "SMAPH-S", a next generation OpenGL ES 2.0 shader-based graphics IP core. DMP will start providing the core to initial customers in 1Q 2010.

SMAPH-S is a high-performance 3D graphics IP core that offers industry lowest power consumption with its state-of-the-art power saving technologies and highly optimized OpenGL ES 2.0 based-shader pipelines. SMAPH-S meets the widespread demand for ASIC/ASSP/SoC applications including mobile devices, consumer electronics, automotive, industry, game consoles, and entertainment devices. With its support of scalable shader architecture, the total number of the geometry and pixel processors can be configured from as small as 2 for entry level mobile devices, up to 24 for high performance devices.

SMAPH-S will be compliant with OpenGL ES 2.0 and fully supports the popular OpenGL ES 1.1, and OpenVG 1.1 standards.

SMAPH-S supports industry standard OCP and AMBA AXI bus interconnect as well as DMP’s proprietary architecture such as optimized cache structure for memory interfaces, which make it easy to integrate the IP into SoC, and achieve system level performance goals in real life implementations.

DMP continues to work with 3rd party middleware tool vendors and offers a variety of content creation tool chains to meet the wide range of needs for different types of application development.

DMP will exhibit SMAPH-S at the "Embedded Technology 2009”, one of Japan’s largest embedded technology trade shows, which will be held in Yokohama, Japan on November 18th – November 20th.

About DMP

Digital Media Professionals Inc. (DMP) is a world-class leader bringing 2D and 3D graphics solutions to market from Japan since its founding in 2002, and is currently developing graphics IP core based on DMP's cutting edge 3D graphics technology DMP Maestro Technology. (Headquarters at: 1-15-5 Naka-cho, Musashino-shi, Tokyo; Capital: 350 million JPY; President & C.E.O.: Tatsuo Yamamoto; http://www.dmprof.com/ )

Khronos Demonstrates OpenCL Momentum at SC09

OpenCL Conformance Tests Now Available With Conformant Products Shipping;
Working Group Membership Expands to Thirty-Three High-Performance Computing, Gaming, Middleware, System and Silicon Vendors

November 16, 2009 – SC09 Conference (Portland OR) – The Khronos™ Group, an industry consortium with more than 100 members working together to create open standards for authoring, accelerating and accessing visual computing, today announced strong industry support and a wide range of shipping products utilizing OpenCL™ at SC09 (an international conference for high-performance computing). A number of demonstrations and tutorials from Khronos Group members highlighting the power and scalability of OpenCL will also be a major part of SC09.

OpenCL is the open, royalty-free standard for general-purpose parallel programming across CPUs, GPUs and other processors. OpenCL provides software developers portable and efficient access to the full power of a wide range of systems including high-performance compute servers, desktop computer systems and handheld devices. The OpenCL 1.0 specification and more details are available at http://www.khronos.org/opencl/.

OpenCL Conformant Products Shipping

Khronos released a conformance suite for the OpenCL 1.0 specification in May 2009 that exhaustively tests both the functionality and numerical accuracy of OpenCL implementations before they are licensed to use the OpenCL trademark. A number of shipping products from working group members have successfully passed OpenCL conformance including products from AMD, Apple and NVIDIA. The current list of conformant products can be found at: http://www.khronos.org/adopters/conformant-products/#topencl

“By enabling cross-platform development for heterogeneous architectures, OpenCL is helping to bring GPU compute capability to mainstream applications,” said Patricia Harrell, director of stream computing at AMD.  “AMD fully supports the advantages of industry standard development through its ATI Stream SDK v2.0, an OpenCL 1.0 compliant solution for both ATI GPUs and x86 CPUs.”

“NVIDIA cares deeply about ensuring that OpenCL developers have the tools they need to easily develop and deploy mainstream applications on more than 150 million NVIDIA OpenCL 1.0-capable GPUs,” said Sanford Russell, general manager, GPU Computing software at NVIDIA. “Our latest R195 driver provides the industry’s most complete support for OpenCL 1.0 with NVIDIA’s OpenCL Visual Profiler and new OpenCL extensions including double precision, ICD and imaging. We are very excited about the increased momentum that OpenCL is creating behind GPU Computing.”

OpenCL Working Group Experiences Significant Membership Growth

The membership of the Khronos OpenCL working group has grown steadily since the release of the OpenCL 1.0 specification, with a rich diversity of companies helping to evolve and support the specification. Membership in the OpenCL working group now includes thirty-three market leaders: Activision Blizzard, AMD, Apple, ARM, Broadcom, Codeplay, Electronic Arts, Ericsson, Freescale, Fujitsu, GE, Graphic Remedy, HI, IBM, Intel, Imagination Technologies, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Motorola, Movidia, Nokia, NVIDIA, Petapath, Presagis, QNX, Qualcomm, S3, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, Takumi, Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI), Toshiba, Vivante and ZiiLABS (formerly 3DLABS).

“Codeplay is very excited about OpenCL because it enables us to adapt our development tools to allow developers to accelerate their C++ software on any device that supports OpenCL,” said Andrew Richards, CEO of Codeplay. “By providing a standard acceleration API, OpenCL enables software developers to invest in GPGPU with confidence that their investment is future-proof.”

“IBM is encouraged by the rapid acceptance of support of the Khronos Group’s OpenCL 1.0 specification, and is pleased to announce the availability of the OpenCL Development Kit for Linux on Power on AlphaWorks,” said Chris Maher, vice president HPC Development at IBM. “IBM recognizes the significance of a portable, high performance, heterogeneous programming language and with this technology preview will enable programmers to easily explore these new programming paradigms on Power and Cell/B.E. Processors.”

“We’ve been working with several of our key licensees and application middleware partners studying advanced usage of our GP-GPU technology,” said Tony King-Smith, Imagination Technologies. “Results so far show that POWERVR SGX graphics cores already in volume production achieve significantly better performance for some algorithms than traditional CPUs clocked 5 times faster when using GLSL under OpenGL ES. Thanks to our highly efficient, scalable unified shader architecture, we can see ways to achieve far more performance using OpenCL with our latest SGX Series5XT cores. We are getting strong feedback from both semiconductor and OEM partners that they wish to use OpenCL as the means of unlocking GP-GPU capabilities in a wide range of applications in mobile, automotive and home entertainment, and Imagination is committed to providing fully compliant OpenCL API support across a significant number of our POWERVR SGX IP cores.”

“Our development experience at Los Alamos National Laboratory with adapting codes to the Roadrunner supercomputing architecture exposed several areas where there were no obvious tools or techniques that would allow us to maintain portability across the variety of platforms that we must routinely support to fulfill the Laboratory’s stewardship mission,” said Ben Bergen, Evolving Applications and Architectures Team, Los Alamos National Laboratory. “Initial proof-of-concept experiments with the OpenCL framework make us optimistic that OpenCL can address many of the challenges that we will be facing as the HPC landscape evolves into the future.”

“TI applauds these OpenCL milestones, as they reiterate the opportunities this heterogeneous standard brings to multiple markets,” said Ameet Suri, marketing manager, OMAP product line, wireless business unit, TI. “OpenCL’s portable, cross platform and high-performance framework pairs with TI’s OMAP applications processors to create a new world of mobile user experiences, and ensures that developers have full access to the parallel and heterogeneous compute capabilities like multiple CPU, GPU, DSP and other imaging accelerators provided by the underlying OMAP platform that will shape the future.”

“Many of our licensees are looking to maximize the potential of embedded GPUs for demanding computing tasks that will differentiate their SoC solutions,” said Wei-Jin Dai, president and CEO of Vivante Corporation. “Vivante is providing native support for OpenCL as a driver for unlocking the power of our GPUs as a compute element in a wide variety of embedded applications.”

OpenCL Sessions at SC09:

The Khronos Group is pleased to participate at SC09 in trade show booth #242 and at multiple OpenCL sessions:

Tutorial : OpenCL - A Standard Platform for Programming Heterogeneous Parallel Computers

• Date: Monday, 16 November 2009, 1:30PM – 5:00PM
• Speakers:
  • Tim Mattson - Intel,
  • Ian Buck - NVIDIA, Mike Houston and Ben Gaster – AMD

BOF (Birds of a Feather) : Can OpenCL Save HPC?

• Date: Wednesday, 18 November 2009 5:30PM – 7:00PM
• Speakers: Tim Mattson – Intel, Ben Gaster – AMD, John Stone - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Marcus Daniels - Los Alamos National Laboratory
• Moderator: Ben Bergen, Computational Physics, Los Alamos National Laboratory

More details of OpenCL sessions at SC09 can be here.

Visitors to the Khronos booth or the OpenCL sessions at SC09 will be offered a free laminated OpenCL Quick Reference card that covers all important aspects of the OpenCL API. The OpenCL Quick Reference Card is also available online.

About OpenCL

OpenCL defines a high-performance, portable parallel programming abstraction to accelerate a wide range of applications, including consumer, media, scientific and HPC solutions.  By creating an efficient, close-to-the-metal programming interface, OpenCL is the foundation layer of a parallel computing ecosystem of platform-independent tools, middleware and applications. OpenCL consists of an API for coordinating parallel computation across heterogeneous processors and a cross-platform kernel programming language with a well-specified computation environment.

About The Khronos Group

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards for authoring, accelerating and accessing visual computing. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenKODE™, OpenWF™ and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at http://www.khronos.org.

Khronos Group Launches OpenWF Standard to 
Accelerate Windowing On Mobile and Embedded Devices

Composition and Display Layering Functionality for Accelerated Windowing Systems;
Integration with Khronos APIs such as OpenGL ES, OpenMAX and OpenVG

November 9, 2009 – Clearlake Park, CA - The Khronos Group, an industry consortium with over 100 members working together to create open standards for authoring, accelerating and accessing visual computing, today announced the release of the OpenWF™ 1.0 standard. OpenWF is an operating system-independent and hardware-neutral foundation for building windowing systems and providing display control functionality in accelerated mobile and embedded devices.

OpenWF enables a new degree of portability, acceleration and abstraction for windowing systems, while adding functionality and features through close integration with Khronos application APIs. OpenWF acts as the underlying route to the display for advanced graphics and multimedia content generated using APIs such as OpenGL® ES for fast and portable 3D graphics, OpenVG™ for vector graphics acceleration, and OpenMAX™ for multimedia.

OpenWF provides two separate but complementary low-level APIs for composition of content and the configuration of display devices: OpenWF Composition and OpenWF Display. OpenWF Display enables portable access to display control hardware for manipulating screen attributes, while OpenWF Composition allows for layering and system-wide composition of application content. The two APIs can be used together or independently, depending on specific platform needs.

OpenWF enables highly-optimized mechanisms to display application content in a windowing system. By eliminating redundant memory accesses, consumed memory bandwidth may be reduced by more than half, resulting in significant power savings. Specific details on features and benefits of OpenWF may be found at http://www.khronos.org/openwf.

Wide range of industry leaders express strong support for OpenWF:

“ARM is looking forward to the wide adoption of OpenWF across multiple operating systems,” said Ian Smythe, director of marketing, Media Processing Division of ARM. “The opportunity for a standard cross platform composition/display API is one we believe will benefit ARM's partners and speed the introduction of high efficiency video and graphics functionality into a wide range of partner products.”

“OpenWF is a valuable extension to the family of Khronos standards,” said Mark Casey, vice president and general manager of mobile multimedia at Broadcom. “These standards help deliver a dramatic improvement in mobile multimedia user experience by simplifying the integration of low-power hardware accelerated architectures into mobile devices.”

“If the UI is slow, nobody cares which CPU or GPU is inside the device,” said Petri Kero, CTO of drawElements Ltd. “System software needs to take full advantage of whatever is under the hood. We have been working on this for a long time already, and we're very excited to see OpenWF standardize the key interfaces.”

“OpenWF is a key graphics technology for Nokia, allowing us to quickly take advantage of diverse hardware platforms,” said Robert Palmer, graphics technology architect at Nokia.

“OpenWF provides a critical missing link for rich media content presentation pipeline. It rids the industry of proprietary methods of uniting media sources with displays and results in faster time to market and better utilization of hardware,” said Jarkko Kemppainen, director, Platform Business at Symbio.

“OpenWF is a system-level API for use by operating system vendors that complements the Khronos mobile APIs for application development,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group. “OpenWF enables low-cost, hardware-accelerated 2D composition - providing an alternative to OpenGL ES-based composition using 3D-intensive GPUs. OpenWF allows platform integrators a wider choice of user interface, price and functionality options within the Khronos ecosystem.”

Key features of OpenWF:

OpenWF Composition:

• Provides layered 2D composition functionality implementable on low-power hardware
• Enables system-wide composition of application content
• Includes alpha-blending, masking, resizing, rotation, mirroring
• Defines scalable acceleration for low-end dedicated hardware through to high-end GPUs
• Optimizes use-cases, such as long-running video playback with subtitles, for low power

OpenWF Display:

• Defines a windowing system-level interface to control display hardware
• Provides configuration control over mode-setting of built-in and external displays
• Includes discovery, power, resolution, rotation and pipeline control
• Supports multiple interfaces including HDMI, DVI, S-Video, embedded LCD panels and legacy display adapters

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards for authoring, accelerating and accessing visual computing. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenKODE™, OpenWF™ and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

Fixstars launches OpenCL software service for application developers Professional service to support utilization of OpenCL

Tokyo, Japan - October 28, 2009 - Fixstars Corporation, a pioneering company in multi-core solutions today announced that it has launched an OpenCL software service. Fixstars provides various services to develop software based on parallel computing framework OpenCL which has high portability for HPC, desktop and embedded application developers.

OpenCL is a parallel computing framework for systems that are consisted of heterogeneous processors such as multi-core CPU, GPU, Cell/B.E., and DSP. OpenCL has been attracting a lot of attention as an efficient, highly portable, and open technology, with the support of major semiconductor chip makers and computer vendors.

The OpenCL software service provides value added support for OpenCL software development focusing mainly on optimization service. We offer porting from existing source code to OpenCL, so customers can use high computational power of hardware while keeping high portability. It also includes pre-development profiling, support from installation to production, and technical transfer.

"The environment of parallel computing is evolving in various ways such as multi-core processor. OpenCL realizes the efficiently and unified software development solution for changing hardware environment in the future", said Ryoji Tsuchiyama, lead engineer of Fixstars Corporation Software Platform group. "I truly believe that we provide high reliability OpenCL solutions with our experience of software development."

About Fixstars Corporation

Fixstars Corporation provides software technology solutions that target Cell/B.E. and GPU with a vision of the future where multi-core microprocessors are the standard. Fixstars enables the increase in performance of Multi-core based operations through provision of a complete, integrated ecosystem with specific turn-key products for Finance, Medical, Manufacturing, and Digital media markets.

For more information, visit www.fixstars.com/en

Khronos is a trademark of the Khronos Group Inc. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc., used under license by Khronos. Additional product and company names mentioned may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

Vivante GPUs Power Marvell ARMADA Application Processors

Vivante Graphics Processors Provide Immersive Multimedia and Stunning Visuals for Next Generation Mobile Computing and Intelligent Connected Devices

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Oct. 27 —Vivante Corporation, a leader in consumer oriented 3D graphics processors, today announced that Marvell (Nasdaq: MRVL) has deployed Vivante’s GC-series graphics processors in the new Marvell® ARMADA™ range of application processors. Marvell ARMADA products are designed specifically for next generation ARM instruction set smartphones, smartbooks, consumer and embedded devices, and displays.

"Marvell is a recognized leader in delivering a range of SoC products with leading edge performance and functionality," said Wei-Jin Dai, Vivante CEO. "Marvell’s ARMADA application processors showcase the leading edge applications that are possible when best-in-class CPUs are combined with Vivante’s high performance GPUs. Vivante has been working with Marvell and their customers along with the application and middleware ecosystem to bring an immersive multimedia user experience to a new class of consumer devices."

"Marvell’s CPU architecture delivers PC-class performance," said Hongyi Chen, Vice President of Engineering, Marvell Processor Group and Application Processor R&D. "Pairing Vivante’s high performance GPU with our CPU technology enables the Marvell ARMADA series to deliver PC-class performance and quality at HD 1080p for applications like Adobe® Flash® technology, Microsoft Silverlight, Blu-ray functionality and engaging 3D games across a wide variety of platforms including Google Android, Linux, Maemo, Ubuntu, Microsoft Windows Embedded CE, Windows Mobile and China Mobile’s OMS."

Vivante’s innovative ScalarMorphic(TM) GPU architecture combines the latest in high performance arithmetic computing, graphics and embedded system design to produce breakthrough levels of performance and image quality for high performance integrated graphics processing at HD 1080p resolutions. Vivante’s underlying ScalarMorphic(TM) GPU architecture is highly scalable in terms of triangle, texture, pixel and shader performance and requires only a few megahertz of CPU to deliver high resolution graphics.

According to graphics industry analyst Dr. Jon Peddie, "The market for embedded GPUs is expanding rapidly with smart phones, mobile Internet devices and media server / set-top box applications creating similar market dynamics to the PC graphics card market explosion a decade earlier. The emergence of robust industry standards from the Khronos Group in the embedded space has fostered an environment where performance, cost and robust API support will rapidly sort the eventual winners from the losers. Vivante has demonstrated strength in these areas which shows they are a force to be reckoned with in this market."

About Vivante Corporation
Vivante is the fastest growing supplier of licensable GPU solutions with more than twenty SoC vendors licensing GPUs for applications from Internet enabled HD 1080p home entertainment, automotive displays, mobile gaming, mobile computing, printer, office automation equipment, camera and smart phones. Vivante’s licenses have garnered design wins from top OEMs around the world with devices incorporating these chips expected to be consumer ready by early 2010. Vivante delivers silicon-proven, low-power, high-performance graphics conformant with the DirectFB, OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1 and OpenVG 1.1 API standards to semiconductor solution providers.  Vivante GPU solutions fully support the Android platform, Adobe Flash  and a wide range of middleware and graphics applications.  The Vivante development environment is used by a worldwide network of application developers and ecosystem partners.  Vivante is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with an R&D center in Shanghai, China. For more information, visit http://www.vivantecorp.com.

About Marvell
Marvell (NASDAQ: MRVL) is a world leader in the development of storage, communications, and consumer silicon solutions. The company’s diverse product portfolio includes switching, transceiver, communications controller, wireless, and storage solutions that power the entire communications infrastructure including enterprise, metro, home, and storage networking. As used in this release, the terms "company" and "Marvell" refer to Marvell Technology Group Ltd. and its subsidiaries. For more information, visit http://www.marvell.com.

 

Khronos Group Releases OpenMAX AL 1.0 Specification for Application-level Video, Audio and Image Processing

7th October, 2009 – The Khronos DevU at Korea Games Conference, Seoul, South Korea – The Khronos™ Group today announced it has publicly released the OpenMAX™ AL 1.0 specification, a royalty-free, cross-platform C-language API for high-performance multimedia applications on mobile and embedded devices. The OpenMAX AL standard simplifies deployment of hardware and software audio, video and imaging capabilities across any platform or operating system. OpenMAX AL enables developers to create rich media applications across a wide range of hardware devices.

OpenMAX AL (Application Layer) enables native applications to be portable across multiple operating systems and hardware platforms by providing an extensive application-level API that enables high-level abstraction for comprehensive audio-visual media functionality. OpenMAX AL provides the ability to create and control player and recorder objects, connecting them to configurable input and output objects.
Inputs and outputs include content readers and writers, headphones, loudspeakers, microphones, display windows, cameras, broadcast radios, LEDs and other types of A/V devices.

OpenMAX AL enables applications to run on a multitude of hardware-accelerated systems as well as software-based media solutions. OpenMAX AL has been designed by many of the leading industry audio, video and photography experts across a range of industries to provide access to a broad range of media functionality, which includes:

• Playback of audio, video, still images and MIDI
• Recording of audio and video from device’s microphone and camera
• Still image shooting including extensive controls for the camera such as exposure settings, zooming and focusing
• Extraction and insertion of content metadata
• General audio controls such as volume, rate and equalizer
• Visual controls such as brightness, contrast, gamma, resizing, mirroring and visual effects such as monochrome, emboss and negative
• Analog radio controls including RDS
• Support for LED and vibrator control

OpenMAX AL is the highest layer of the OpenMAX family of APIs for multimedia acceleration and application development. In addition, Khronos also provides the OpenMAX IL (Integration Layer) API which defines a low-level abstraction to codecs, file manipulations, transformations and peripheral components on a system. OpenMAX IL enables system integrators and media framework vendors to efficiently and flexibly integrate the internals of a multimedia architecture with a range of different acceleration silicon. OpenMAX IL may be used as an efficient acceleration layer for implementing OpenMAX AL and enables media processing components to interoperate with each other, even if they are delivered from multiple vendors. The latest version of OpenMAX IL, v1.1.2, was released in September 2008.

The OpenMAX AL specification is immediately available for download at http://www.khronos.org/openmax/ and may be used royalty-free by implementers and developers. A paid Adopters Program for OpenMAX AL is also available immediately at http://www.khronos.org/adopters/ which provides extensive conformance tests to ensure cross-implementation consistency and a trademark license for conformant implementations.

“The Khronos Working group for OpenMAX AL is very proud to have achieved our goal of releasing the 1.0 version of this important new specification here at Korea Games Conference, an important venue for graphics and visual technologies,” said Yeshwant Muthusamy, a technology manager at Nokia and Chair of the OpenMAX AL Working Group at Khronos. “Many of the key mobile media industry companies have actively participated in making this standard as robust and inclusive as it has become, and we are very confident that the multimedia community will embrace OpenMAX AL to enable the widest range of platform-independent rich media applications.”

About The Khronos Group

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™,OpenSL ES™, OpenKODE™, and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

Vivante Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) Technology Selected by Cavium Networks

SUNNYVALE, CA – September 22, 2009 – Vivante Corporation today announced that Cavium Networks, a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for networking, communications, wireless, video, and storage applications, has selected Vivante’s GPU technology to power rich graphical user interfaces (GUIs) in their ARM-based processor family. The Cavium Networks ARM-based processor family with Vivante’s GPU technology will be used by networking, storage and consumer electronic equipment manufacturers building intelligent and interactive FTTH broadband routers, network attached storage appliances, Internet media players, picture frames and other connected home and office equipment.

“Vivante graphics solutions enable our licensees to deliver a differentiated end user experience which is tightly linked to the middleware and application ecosystem,” said Wei-Jin Dai, President and CEO of Vivante Corporation.  “We are proud to welcome Cavium Networks to the growing list of silicon solutions incorporating our GPUs.”

“Vivante’s GPU technology will provide Cavium’s customers with a rich set of graphic capabilities so they can build interactive and feature rich user interfaces,” said Sridhar Gollapudi, Head of Marketing, Connected Home and Office Group at Cavium Networks. “We are extremely pleased with the excellent support and high performance of the Vivante GPU solution. We look forward to working with the talented Vivante team to bring world-class user interface capabilities to next generation connected home and office devices.”

About Vivante Corporation

Vivante Corporation is an embedded graphics technology leader, licensing its Mobile Visual Reality to semiconductor solution providers that serve embedded computing markets for mobile gaming, high-definition home entertainment, image processing, and automotive display and entertainment.  The Vivante ScalarMorphicTM architecture brings a PC-quality visual experience to embedded systems.  Vivante GPUs produce the highest performance per square millimeter in less silicon area, compared to other licensable GPU cores.  Vivante delivers silicon-proven, low-power, high-performance graphics conformant with the OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1 and OpenVG API standards.  Vivante GPU IP also fully supports the Android platform.  The Vivante development environment is used by a worldwide network of application developers and ecosystem partners.  Vivante is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with an R&D center in Shanghai, China.  For more information please visit Vivante online.

About Cavium Networks

Cavium Networks is a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing in networking, communications, storage, wireless, video and security applications. Cavium Networks offers a broad portfolio of integrated, software-compatible processors ranging in performance from 10Mbps to 20Gbps that enable secure, intelligent functionality in enterprise, data-center, broadband/consumer and access & service provider equipment.  Cavium Networks processors are supported by ecosystem partners that provide operating systems, tool support, reference designs and other services.  Cavium Networks principal offices are in Mountain View, California with design team locations in California, Massachusetts, India and Taiwan.  For more information, please visit: www.caviumnetworks.com.

 

Ultimate Mini-ITX HD Multimedia Platform Combines DX10.1 and Dual HDMI through both Discrete and Integrated Graphics

Taipei, Taiwan, September 22, 2009 - VIA Technologies, Inc, a leading innovator of power efficient x86 processor platforms, today announced the first ever Mini-ITX board to feature a dedicated on-board graphics processor and dual HDMI ports. The VIA VB8003 is ideally suited for a range of advanced digital media applications, supporting the latest advanced HD codecs and DX10.1 graphics. A wide range of connectivity options are available, including four display configurations using the VIA VB8003’s two HDMI, DVI and VGA ports.

The VIA VB8003 takes advantage of the ‘VIA Trinity’ platform, the codename for a unique combination of 64-bit VIA Nano processor, VIA VX800 media system processor and a dedicated S3 Graphics processor; producing a perfect blend of Hi-Def video playback, DX10.1 graphics and multiple display connectivity, all within a ruthlessly low, industry-leading thermal envelope.

The VIA VB8003 Mini-ITX board can utilize the integrated graphics of the VIA VX800 MSP in tandem with the dedicated S3 Graphics processor to offer developers the widest possible variety of multi-display configurations, including dual-HDMI, LVDS, DVI and VGA technologies. Powering HD content playback across as many as four uniquely configured displays, with supported resolutions of up to and beyond 1080p, the VIA VB8003 is a HD powerhouse, ideal for a range of next-generation digital interactive devices and digital signage applications.

"The VIA VB8003 is the first Mini-ITX board to harness the unique performance efficiency of the VIA Nano processor combined with a dedicated HD capable DX10.1 graphics processor," said Daniel Wu, Vice President of VIA Embedded, VIA Technologies, Inc. "We are confident that the HD adept VB8003 will be massive hit with developers of the latest digital multimedia devices, making it easier than ever to employ high resolution, compression intensive content across multiple displays."

About the VIA VB8003

The VIA VB8003 Mini-ITX board is powered by a 1.6GHz VIA Nano processor coupled with the VIA VX800 media system processor and the S3 Graphics 435 ULP graphics processor. Supporting up to 4GB of DDR2 system memory, the VIA VB8003’s dedicated GPU can take advantage of 256MB of dedicated GDDR3 graphics memory.

On-board I/O includes dual HDMI, a DVI port, VGA port and two RCA jacks, dual Gigabit Ethernet RJ-45 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, serial and PS2 ports. Storage includes two S-ATA ports, a 40-pin IDE and a type 2 Compact Flash slot.

The S3 Graphics 435 ULP Graphics Processor

The S3 Graphics 435 ULP dedicated graphics processor is specially designed to provide advanced multimedia capabilities for next-generation embedded applications and is the lowest power DX10.1 GPU on the market today. The S3 Graphics 435 ULP is a 64-bit processor that supports the latest display connectivity technologies, a DirectX 10.1 graphics engine and OpenGL 2.1 unified shader.

Featuring the ChromotionHD™ engine, a fully programmable video architecture with true HD quality 1080p playback on the latest HD standards including Blu-ray Disk, H.264, VC-1, WMV-9, MPEG-2/4 and AVS, the S3 Graphics 435 ULP offers stunningly smooth HD playback at resolutions of up to 2560 x 1600 pixels.

For more information about the VIA VB8003 please visit:

 
• A short video featuring the VIA VB8003 can be seen here:
 
• http://www.viavideolibrary.com/index.php?option=com_seyret&Itemid=2&task=videodirectlink&id=132
 
• Images of the VIA VB8003 can be found here:
 
• http://www.viagallery.com/index.php?option=com_flickr4j&Task=sets&Set=72157622392744194&Page=1

About VIA Technologies, Inc.

VIA Technologies, Inc is the foremost fabless supplier of power efficient x86 processor platforms that are driving system innovation in the PC, client, ultra mobile and embedded markets. Combining energy-saving processors with digital media chipsets and advanced connectivity, multimedia and networking silicon enables a broad spectrum of computing and communication platforms, including its widely acclaimed ultra compact mainboards. Headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan, VIA’s global network links the high tech centers of the US, Europe and Asia, and its customer base includes the world’s top OEMs and system integrators. http://www.via.com.tw

 

The Khronos Group Announces Significant COLLADA Momentum at SIGGRAPH 2009

Industry-Leading Open Format for the Exchange of 3D Assets Supporting New Compliance Opportunities; OpenCOLLADA Support for 3ds Max & Maya; Dassault Systemes Announces Broad Support for COLLADA, Integration with Google, EA, Blender & Yumetech

August 5, 2009 – New Orleans, SIGGRAPH 2009 – The Khronos™ Group, an industry consortium creating open standards for the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media, today announced a wide range of new cross-industry support for COLLADA™, the Khronos-developed standard for 3D asset sharing.

COLLADA defines an XML-based schema making it simple to transport 3D assets between applications - enabling diverse 3D authoring and content processing tools to be easily combined into a production pipeline. As an intermediate language, The COLLADA schema 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. The Khronos Group has also made the COLLADA 1.5 specification and release notes available in Japanese at http://www.khronos.org/collada.

Among the wide range of CAD/CAM/CAE, gaming, consumer and professional 3D leaders supporting COLLADA at SIGGRAPH this year are Google®, through the company’s O3D plugin for the viewing of 3D objects on any Web page; Maxis®/EA® via their award-winning Spore® game, and Blender™, being showcased in the Blender Foundation booth #3701.

“The Blender Foundation supports the efforts of the individuals working on the import and export of COLLADA into Blender. With COLLADA support in Blender now, our artists can enjoy open interchange with the many DCC tools that support COLLADA. This will only enrich the art developed in Blender,” said Ton Roosendaal, President of the Blender Foundation.

In a major move of COLLADA support, Dassault Systèmes (DS) (Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA), the world leader in 3D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, today announced that 3D models hosted on the 3DVIA.com library, will now be automatically converted to both the Dassault Systèmes’ 3DXML format and the COLLADA™ open 3D format. The addition of COLLADA support further connects the 3DVIA product lineup to the wide range of digital content creation (DCC) software and applications that also support COLLADA .dae documents.

“Our goal is to make it extremely easy for a broad community to leverage 3D as a communication medium—empowering all kinds of people to create and share professional quality, 3D experiences,” said Lynne Wilson, CEO of Dassault Systèmes’ 3DVIA brand. “Having both 3DXML and COLLADA uniquely positions 3DVIA.com to collect, showcase and share the wide array of 3D content created by the both the CAD and DCC communities.”

Demos are at the 3DVIA booth #3009, where 3DVIA will demonstrate its complete product line, including the new COLLADA support. Additionally, Dassault’s SolidWorks and Bitmangement will also showcase updated COLLADA support.

After one year of Beta, NetAllied Systems finally released the next generation of COLLADA exporters and importers for Autodesk 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya built on the latest OpenCOLLADA SDK. OpenCOLLADA plug-ins are available for immediate download at http://www.opencollada.org

The OpenCOLLADA plugins support all major versions for 3ds Max (8 to 2010, Win32, Win64) and Maya (2008, 2009, Win32, Win64, MacOSX). The most important new features include:

 
• First available tools that fully supports COLLADA 1.5.0
 
• Embedded into 3ds Max is a 3d Google Warehouse client that allows seamless import of hundreds of thousands of 3d models (see http://www.youtube.com/netallied)
 
• Performance boost up to five times for importing and exporting compared to any other solution available
 
• Interoperability has been tested with many tools, including the newly released Electronic Arts Spore and Daz Studio exporters or Bentley Microstation 8i
 
• Plug-in installers are available on http://www.opencollada.org under a freeware license that allows commercial usage
 
• The underlying OpenCOLLADA SDK offers direct write and SAX parsing import that are far superior than any other existing import/export technology. They are available under the MIT license and allow integration in any commercial and proprietary solution. OpenCOLLADA is the basis for the upcoming Blender/COLLADA support and is already built into multiple commercial tools that support data conversion to DAE from CAD systems like CATIA V5, MicroStation or JTOpen. Source code for the complete OpenCOLLADA SDK is available on http://sf.net/projects/opencollada.

The Khronos COLLADA WG also announced today the availability of the first release of the OpenCOLLADA framework to fully support the reading and writing of COLLADA 1.4.1 and 1.5.0 files. Further performance improvements and minor bug fixes have been included. MathML support (required for Kinematics) is available as well. Downloads are available at http://www.opencollada.org/download.html.

Lastly, Khronos today announced upcoming availability of the COLLADA™ 1.4 Conformance Test Suite for Khronos Adopters this fall.  Originally put up for open bid in April of 2009 to select an industry leader capable of developing a conformance suite matched to the full range of the COLLADA specification, Yumetech™ (Seattle, WA) was awarded the contract.

Based on their years of experience in working with 3D and open source software, for 3D graphics development, Yumetech is developing the Test Suite on-time with a wide range of additional test cases and is currently entering closed beta with Khronos members that include Autodesk Inc. The company has prior experience developing portions of the X3D conformance suite and is a current member of Khronos and participates in the COLLADA work group.

”The COLLADA Conformance Test Suite and Khronos Adopter’s Package will enable adopters to attain the highest degrees of conformance, interoperability, and robustness,” said Mark Barnes, Khronos COLLADA work group chairman. “Khronos and Yumetech are creating a comprehensive testing framework that will evaluate all aspects of COLLADA import and export for adopting applications. The test results can award a COLLADA badge of conformance for the Adopter’s products and help market their quality COLLADA support to the Adopter’s customers and users.”

About The Khronos Group
  The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenKODE™, and COLLADA™.  All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at http://www.khronos.org.

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Khronos Details WebGL Initiative to Bring Hardware-Accelerated 3D Graphics to the Internet

JavaScript Binding to OpenGL ES 2.0 for Rich 3D Web Graphics without Browser Plugins;
Wide industry Support from Major Browser Vendors including Google, Mozilla and Opera; Specification will be Available Royalty-free to all Developers

4th August, 2009 – New Orleans, SIGGRAPH 2009 – 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.  First announced at the Game Developers Conference in March of 2009, the WebGL working group includes many industry leaders such as AMD, Ericsson, Google, Mozilla, NVIDIA and Opera.  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.  The working group is developing the specification to provide content portability across diverse browsers and platforms, including the capability of portable, secure shader programs.  WebGL will be a royalty-free standard developed under the proven Khronos development process, with the target of a first public release in first half of 2010.  Khronos warmly welcomes any interested company to become a member and participate in the development of the WebGL specification.

The WebGL specification will leverage recent developments in Web technology including the Canvas element defined as part of the HTML 5 specification and the marked increases in JavaScript performance across all major browsers.  Accelerated OpenGL ES functionality that is directly accessible from JavaScript is expected to encourage a wide variety of 3D-enhanced Web applications including those using rich user interfaces for enhanced navigation and functionality - making the Web more enjoyable, productive and intuitive for end-users.

“The Web has already seen the wide proliferation of compelling 2D graphical applications, and we think 3D is the next step for Firefox. We look forward to a new class of 3D-enriched Web applications within Canvas, and for creative synergy between OpenGL developers and Web developers,” said Arun Ranganathan of Mozilla and chair of the WebGL working group.

“Google is committed to open web standards and is very excited to be part of the WebGL initiative,” said Matt Papakipos, engineering director at Google.  “We believe that WebGL is an important step toward making high-performance 3D possible in the browser.”

“The WebGL working group inside Khronos is a unique forum that is bringing together browser and silicon vendors to create a low-level, foundation API for 3D on the Web,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president at NVIDIA.  “Khronos will be reaching out to the key Web standards groups and the wider community to ensure WebGL is an appropriate, dynamic and enabling piece of the Web ecosystem.”

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenKODE™, and COLLADA™.  All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at http://www.khronos.org.

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Khronos, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenSL ES and OpenMAX are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc.  OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc., COLLADA is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. and OpenGL is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics International used under license by Khronos.  All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

 

Latest desktop GPU functionality now fully accessible through cross-platform open 3D standard; Close alignment with OpenCL for p

3rd August, 2009 – New Orleans, SIGGRAPH 2009 – The Khronos™ Group, today announced OpenGL® 3.2, the third major update in twelve months to the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API (application programming interface) 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 specification is available for immediate download at http://www.opengl.org/registry.

OpenGL 3.2 adds features for enhanced performance, increased visual quality, accelerated geometry processing and easier portability of Direct3D applications. In addition, the evolution of OpenGL and other standards within Khronos, including OpenCL™ for parallel compute, OpenGL ES for mobile 3D graphics and the new WebGL™ standard for 3D on the web are being coordinated to create a powerful graphics and compute ecosystem that spans many application, markets and devices. The installed base of OpenGL 3.2 compatible GPUs already exceeds 150 million units.

The OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) working group at Khronos has defined GLSL 1.5, an updated version of the OpenGL Shading language, and two profiles within the OpenGL 3.2 specification providing developers the choice of using the streamlined Core profile for new application development or the Compatibility profile which provides full backwards compatibility with previous versions of the OpenGL standard for existing and workstation applications.

OpenGL 3.2 has been designed to run on a wide range of recent GPU silicon and provides a wide range of significant benefits to application developers, including:

• Increased performance for vertex arrays and fence sync objects to avoid idling while waiting for resources shared between the CPU and GPU, or multiple CPU threads;
• Improved pipeline programmability, including geometry shaders in the OpenGL core;
• Boosted cube map visual quality and multisampling rendering flexibility by enabling shaders to directly process texture samples.

In addition, Khronos has defined a set of five new ARB extensions that enable the very latest graphics functionality introduced in the newest GPUs to be accessed through OpenGL – these extensions will be absorbed into the core of a future version of OpenGL when this functionality is proven and widely adopted.
“Khronos has proven to be a great home for the OpenGL ARB,” stated Dr. Jon Peddie founder and principal of Jon Peddie Research. “Not only has the ARB has put the pedal to the metal to enable OpenGL to be a true platform for graphics innovation, but the synergy of coherently developing a family of related standards is leveraging OpenGL’s strengths - OpenGL is truly the foundation on which rich graphics for mobile devices and the Web is being built.”

“AMD is thrilled to be participating in the OpenGL ARB, which has delivered on its promise to frequently update the OpenGL API,” said Janet Matsuda, senior director, AMD Professional Graphics. “Producing three new versions of the specification in twelve months is a remarkable achievement.”

“NVIDIA is committed to the continued rapid evolution and adoption of OpenGL and we are proud to release our OpenGL 3.2 beta drivers on the same day as the specification itself is published,” said Barthold Lichtenbelt, chair of the OpenGL ARB working group and OpenGL engineering manager at NVIDIA.  “The OpenGL ARB is committed to providing top-notch graphics features while protecting investment in OpenGL code. We are listening carefully to developer feedback and will continue to rapidly evolve OpenGL to meet the needs of the industry.”

“The strategy behind OpenGL 3 is to bring revolutionary changes to OpenGL through a rapid sequence of evolutionary updates, and the ARB continues to effectively execute to that plan,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president at NVIDIA. “OpenGL 3.0 set the stage with new mechanisms to enable OpenGL to respond to diverse market needs, OpenGL 3.1 used those mechanisms to streamline the API while adding new functionality. Now we have OpenGL 3.2 that fully exposes state-of-the-art GPU capabilities in a form that meets the needs of both new and experienced OpenGL developers.”

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenKODE™, and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at http://www.khronos.org.

Chinese Academy of Sciences Selects Vivante as GPU Partner for Netbooks

Sunnyvale, CA, June 29, 2009–(PRNewswire)–Vivante Corporation today announced a collaborative relationship with the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICT).  This long-term, development partnership will enable ICT and Vivante to integrate their respective CPU and GPU designs into a cost-efficient, low-power SoC and advance the state-of-the-art in netbook technology for the next generation.

ICT, which specializes in comprehensive research into computer science and technology in China, successfully produced China’s first general-purpose digital computer and is an R&D base for high-performance, low-power computer technology in China.  ICT research focuses on strategic, advanced, and fundamental contributions toward industry innovation, national needs, and market demands.

“As we look toward making netbooks both more capable and more accessible, we find Vivante GPUs to be the perfect solution for small size and low power while providing robust, fully featured graphics and fast performance,” said Dr. Weiwu Hu, chief architect of the ICT’s CPU division.
  Adds Wei-Jin Dai, President and CEO of Vivante, “Our ability to deliver the highest performing GPU per square millimeter and per milliwatt across the spectrum of mobile computing, handheld, and home entertainment device requirements is once again validated by ICT selecting a Vivante GPU design.  The Vivante ScalarMorphic™ GPU architecture flexes and scales to address a wide range of price/performance requirements and silicon budgets.  We look forward to ongoing collaboration with ICT, as we apply leading edge Vivante technology to power next generation wired and wireless embedded applications in new and interesting ways.”

About Vivante Corporation
  Vivante Corporation is an embedded graphics technology leader, licensing its Mobile Visual Reality to semiconductor solution providers that serve embedded computing markets for mobile gaming, high-definition home entertainment, image processing, and automotive display and entertainment.  The Vivante ScalarMorphicTM architecture brings a PC-quality visual experience to embedded systems.  Vivante GPUs produce the highest performance per square millimeter in less silicon area, compared to other licensable GPU cores.  Vivante delivers silicon-proven, low-power, high-performance graphics conformant with the OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1 and OpenVG API standards.  Vivante GPU IP also fully supports the Android platform.  The Vivante development environment is used by a worldwide network of application developers and ecosystem partners.  Vivante is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with an R&D center in Shanghai, China.

 

Intel and Nokia announce strategic relationship to shape next era of Mobile Computing innovation

Santa Clara CA, U.S. and Espoo, Finland - Further uniting the Internet with mobile phones and computers, Intel Corporation and Nokia today announced a long-term relationship to develop a new class of Intel® Architecture-based mobile computing device and chipset architectures which will combine the performance of powerful computers with high-bandwidth mobile broadband communications and ubiquitous Internet connectivity.

To realize this shared vision, both companies are expanding their longstanding relationship to define a new mobile platform beyond today’s smartphones, notebooks and netbooks, enabling the development of a variety of innovative hardware, software and mobile Internet services.

Taking advantage of each company’s expertise as leaders in their respective fields, these future standards-based devices will marry the best features and capabilities of the computing and communications worlds and will transform the user experience, bringing incredible mobile applications and always on, always connected wireless Internet access in a user-friendly pocketable form factor.

The Intel and Nokia effort includes collaboration in several open source mobile Linux software projects. Intel will also acquire a Nokia HSPA/3G modem IP license for use in future products.

The companies expect many innovations to result from this collaboration over time.

"This Intel and Nokia collaboration unites and focuses many of the brightest computing and communications minds in the world, and will ultimately deliver open and standards-based technologies, which history shows drive rapid innovation, adoption and consumer choice," said Anand Chandrasekher, Intel Corporation senior vice president and general manager, Ultra Mobility Group. "With the convergence of the Internet and mobility as the team’s only barrier, I can only imagine the innovation that will come out of our unique relationship with Nokia. The possibilities are endless."

"Today’s announcement represents a significant commitment to work together on the future of mobile computing, and we plan to turn our joint research into action," said Kai Öistämö, Executive Vice President, Devices, Nokia.  "We will explore new ideas in designs, materials and displays that will go far beyond devices and services on the market today.  This collaboration will be compelling not only for our companies, but also for our industries, our partners and, of course, for consumers."

Open Source Software Collaboration

The effort also includes technology development and cooperation in several open source software initiatives in order to develop common technologies for use in the Moblin and Maemo platform projects, which will deliver Linux-based operating systems for these future mobile computing devices.

The companies are coordinating their Open Source technology selection and development investments, including alignment on a range of key Open Source technologies for Mobile Computing such as: oFono*, ConnMan*, Mozilla*, X.Org*, BlueZ*, D-BUS*, Tracker*, GStreamer*, PulseAudio*. Collectively, these technologies will provide an open source standards-based means to deliver a wealth of mobile Internet and communication experiences, with rich graphics and multimedia capabilities.

Hosted by the Linux Foundation, Moblin is an optimized open source Linux operating system project that delivers visually rich Internet media experiences on Intel® Atom(TM) processor-based devices including MIDs, netbooks, nettops, in-vehicle infotainment (IVI), and embedded systems. For more information see http://www.moblin.org.

Maemo is a Linux operating system, mostly based on open source code and powers mobile computers such as the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. The Maemo platform has been developed by Nokia in collaboration with many open source projects. For more information see http://www.maemo.org.

Enabling common technologies across the Moblin and Maemo software environments will help foster the development of compatible applications for these devices - building on the huge number of off-the-shelf PC compatible applications.  The open source projects will be governed using the best practices of the open source development model.

Intel to License Nokia’s HSPA/3G Modem Technologies

Building on today’s announcement, Intel and Nokia have signed an agreement that will enable Intel to license Nokia’s HSPA/3G modem technologies with the aim of developing advanced mobile computing solutions that deliver a powerful and flexible computing experience - combining the best-in-class 3GPP modem technology with the high performance and low power consumption of future Intel Architecture-based platforms.

Intel supports multiple mobile broadband standards on its platforms to address the needs of service providers worldwide, and to provide people with an always-connected experience.

The Nokia modem license complements Intel’s broadband wireless technologies and will enable the company to extend chipset solutions incorporating Nokia’s modem technologies across its mobility offerings in the future.

Nokia is continuing to develop its leading modem technology, which includes protocol software and related digital design for the full suite of 3GPP standards through WCDMA/GSM and its evolution, and then licenses the technology to chipset manufacturers to develop and produce chipsets for device manufacturers.

Nokia’s licensable modem technology is the trusted connectivity choice, providing credible and reliable options for the industry based on Nokia wireless modems’ embedded history and experience. The Intel license of Nokia’s modem technologies is another step in executing Nokia’s chipset strategy to create multiple, competitive chipset choices to the industry.

ALT Software selected to deliver DO- 178B certifiable OpenGL Drivers for ATI RadeonTM E4690 GPU

— With support from AMD, ALT Software will enable the Aerospace, Avionics and Military Industries with both Safety Critical and COTS OpenGL Drivers.—

Toronto, Canada – June 22nd, 2009 - ALT Software, the leading provider of advanced graphics software for safety-critical embedded systems, today announced its commitment to deliver DO-178B certifiable OpenGL drivers for the ATI Radeon™ E4690, AMD’s (NYSE: AMD) newest high performance embedded graphics accelerator. As part of its commitment to AMD’s Embedded GPU roadmap, ALT Software will be delivering both OpenGL SC (Safety Critical) and OpenGL ES 2.0 support for the ATI Radeon E4690. Leveraging its success and experience with ATI Mobility Radeon™ X1400 and ATI Mobility Radeon™ 9000 and in collaboration with AMD, ALT Software will be enabled to unlock the power of the ATI Radeon E4690 for today’s embedded system integrators and OEMs to deploy highly complex graphical user interfaces in next generation avionics applications.

The ATI Radeon E4690 from AMD is a fully programmable GPU with a unified shader architecture designed for the embedded market.  It will feature more than three times the performance of the ATI Radeon™ E2400 embedded graphics accelerator, a 128-bit memory interface, 512MB of on-chip memory, and a PCI-E 2.0 x16 interface.  

“We are pleased that ALT Software has chosen to provide the 2D/3D DO-178B certifiable graphics drivers,” said Janet Matsuda, Senior Director of Professional Graphics, AMD. “With the launch of the ATI Radeon E4690 GPU, AMD demonstrates our continued commitment to this market, not only with high performance GPUs, but with support for our software partners like ALT.”

A new initiative involving ALT Software, Channel One and Wolf Industrial Systems is also announced today. These three companies have joined together to form the Advanced Graphics Solutions (AGS) Group whose mission is to provide a total end-to-end solution for ATI Radeon E4690 graphics accelerators.  Each member of the AGS Group plays a vital role in ensuring the success and adoption of this GPU as follows;

• ALT Software Inc., for delivering 2D/3D OpenGL Drivers for RTOS and DO-178B.
• Channel One Limited, providing long term availability of electronic components.
• Wolf Industrial Systems Inc., for rapid design, development and manufacturing of reference hardware.

 “ALT Software is excited to be a founding member of the AGS Group, and we are fully committed with the other members to support AMD’s embedded GPU Roadmap,”,” said Darryl Parisien, President of ALT Software.”With AMD’s support, ALT Software and the AGS Group will unlock the full power of ATI Radeon E4690.”

Vivante Corporation Signs 15th GPU Licensee

Sunnyvale, CA, June 8, 2009—(PR Newswire)—Vivante Corporation today announced the company has expanded to 15 the number of licensees for its graphics processing unit (GPU) cores.  Vivante licensees, which include both established and emerging fabless semiconductor leaders, have taped out more than 20 SoC designs incorporating Vivante GPUs.

Vivante Corporation’s 2D and 3D GPU IP cores are designed specifically for embedded applications, from smart phones to Internet-enabled high-definition home entertainment displays.  Vivante is a privately held company backed by U.S. and Asian investment funds and includes Fujitsu Limited (TSE: 6702.T) as a corporate investor via its corporate venture capital fund.

Vivante’s graphics technology is differentiated by its robust conformance to Khronos Group standards OpenVG and OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1 and by its remarkably small silicon footprint which enables Vivante licensees to maximize graphics performance delivered per square millimeter of silicon area and per milliwatt of system power consumption.  High-performance, silicon-efficient GPU technology with low system power consumption is a key differentiator for fabless semiconductor companies addressing the growing consumer appetite for 3D graphical user interfaces, acceleration of Internet standards like Flash, as well as gaming on handheld and home entertainment platforms.

“Licensing Vivante GPU’s to 15 SoC companies to power their next generation products validates the strategic importance of the unique, low power graphics technology Vivante delivers to the consumer electronics market,” said Wei-Jin Dai, President and CEO of Vivante Corporation.

About Vivante Corporation

Vivante Corporation is an embedded graphics technology leader, licensing its Mobile Visual Reality and HD Visual Reality IP to semiconductor solution providers that serve the embedded mobile gaming, high-definition home entertainment, image processing, and automotive display and entertainment markets.  The Vivante ScalarMorphicTM architecture brings a PC-quality visual experience to embedded systems.  Vivante GPUs produce the highest performance per square millimeter in half the final silicon area compared to other licensable GPU cores.  Vivante delivers silicon-proven, low-power, high-performance graphics conformant with the OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1 and OpenVG API standards.  Vivante GPU IP also fully supports the Android platform.  The Vivante development environment is used by a worldwide network of application developers and ecosystem partners.  Vivante is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with an R&D center in Shanghai, China.

Opera joins the Khronos Group as a contributing member

Oslo, Norway — May 29, 2009

Opera Software today announced that it has joined the Khronos Group to support the evolution of open standards that enable the authoring and acceleration of 3D graphics, games and media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Opera has a long history in supporting open standards on the Web and joining Khronos is another big step in that directioan.

Opera will specifically be involved in an initiative to create an open, royalty-free standard for bringing accelerated 3D graphics to the Web. This will provide a way to bring dynamic 3D content to everyone’s Web browser. Members of the Khronos Group are building the only existing cross-platform hardware acceleration API (application programming interface).

“Although there is a very limited use of 3D graphics on the Web today, we are not far from the day when it will become very popular,” said Tim Johansson, lead (core) graphics developer at Opera Software. “Opera has had an interest in 3D in Web applications for a long time and joining the Khronos Group in writing a specification for 3D on the Web is the next logical step. Opera looks forward to sharing its expertise in graphics and Web development through this initiative.”

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium of over 100 leading companies creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include

OpenGL, OpenGL ES and OpenCL

“We warmly welcome Opera as a valued new member of the Khronos Group and their participation in the 3D Web working group,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group. “Opera’s membership will further our mission to bring open, general purpose 3D capabilities to Web developers and browsers everywhere. Enabling key browser developers to work side-by-side with GPU vendors and system OEMs will result in creating cutting-edge 3D Web solutions with real relevance in the marketplace.

About Khronos Group

Founded in January 2000, the Khronos Group is an open, member-funded consortium committed to developing royalty-free standards which enables all members to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, vote at various stages before public deployment, and to the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos is trademark of the Khronos Group Inc. OpenCL™ is a trademark of Apple Inc., OpenGL® is a registered trademark and OpenGL ES is a trademark of SGI used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

About Opera Software ASA

Opera Software ASA has redefined Web browsing for PCs, mobile phones and other networked devices. Opera’s cross-platform Web browser technology is renowned for its performance, standards compliance and small size, while giving users a faster, safer and more dynamic online experience. Opera Software is headquartered in Oslo, Norway, with offices around the world. The company is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol OPERA. Learn more about Opera at http://www.opera.com/.

Providing OpenGL ES 2.0 Graphics Solutions with Smallest Silicon Area

SUNNYVALE, CA, May 22, 2009–Vivante Corporation announced today that a Taiwanese developer of high quality multimedia chipsets for mobile applications and a trusted supplier to global first-tier handset makers has added silicon proven Vivante scalable 2D and 3D graphics solutions to their system-on-chip (SoC) designs.

Combining remarkably small die size with outstanding performance and image quality, the Vivante graphics solution was the clear choice for distinguishing in a visual way these highly integrated mobile chipsets in the marketplace.

Vivante GPU IP technology enables OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1 and OpenVG graphics hardware acceleration in customer SoCs targeting low power computing for consumer applications like personal multimedia, entertainment, and portable navigation, where the user’s visual experience makes the difference.

“As silicon area savings and performance delivered per milliwatt have become critical factors in selecting a GPU, we have seen rapid market adoption of our Khronos-compliant GPU cores,” observed Wei-Jin Dai, President and CEO of Vivante Corporation. “Each of our silicon proven GPU cores leads in its category with the best performance per square millimeter, giving our SoC customers the ability to differentiate their platforms with fast, high quality on-screen displays, graphical user interfaces and handheld games.”

About Vivante Corporation

Vivante Corporation is an embedded graphics technology leader, licensing its Mobile Visual Reality and HD Visual Reality IP to semiconductor solution providers that serve the embedded mobile, high definition home entertainment, image processing, and automotive display and entertainment markets. The Vivante ScalarMorphicTM architecture brings a PC-quality visual experience to embedded systems. Vivante GPUs produce the highest performance per square millimeter in half the final silicon area compared to other licensable GPU cores. Vivante delivers silicon proven, low power, high performance graphics conformant with the OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1 and OpenVG API standards. Vivante GPU IP also fully supports the Android platform. The Vivante development environment is used by a worldwide network of application developers and ecosystem partners. Vivante is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California with an R&D center in Shanghai, China.

 

Incoras Solutions announces MediaDesigner™

Dublin, Ireland, May 19, 2009 ⎯ Incoras Solutions Ltd today announced the full release of MediaDesigner version 1.2, Eclipse-based design and test workbench that dramatically reduces time-to-market, costs and risks in the development of multi-media products using the Khronos OpenMAX IL standard.  As a contributing member of Khronos, Incoras Solutions has used its in-depth knowledge of the OpenMAX IL standard to develop a leading edge design tool that addresses a niche in the multi-media market.

“Khronos defines open, royalty-free standards that are gaining widespread adoption across the industry and are enabling developers to accelerate rich media applications on multiple platforms,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group.  “Tools are critical in a standards ecosystem and so I am delighted that Incoras is announcing full support for OpenMAX IL in the MediaDesigner workbench.  With its ability to automatically generate and test OpenMAX IL component interfaces, MediaDesigner offers an easy way to leverage the power of the OpenMAX IL standard for both existing users and newcomers alike.”

“We are excited to offer MediaDesigner support for the OpenMAX IL standard,” said Dave Murray, CEO of Incoras Solutions. “The high level of complexity of today’s media-rich mobile platforms demands a comprehensive set of cross-platform open standards, coupled with intelligent tool support. OpenMAX IL and the MediaDesigner workbench offer the ideal combination to address a real and growing need in the market place.

The underlying model-based methodology adopted in MediaDesigner delivers a breakthrough in design efficiency, allowing Silicon vendors, OEMs, OS vendors and 3rd party algorithm suppliers to rapidly create OpenMAX IL solutions and speed through the Khronos adoption process. MediaDesigner allows multi-disciplined teams to specify, build, test, demonstrate and deploy OpenMAX components and integrated media applications in an intuitive, coordinated & consistent manner. Already proven with a range of OpenMAX IL enabled platforms, MediaDesigner’s plug & play methodology yields huge savings in design and test time, while improving product quality, consistency and re-use.

“Looking beyond today’s solutions, MediaDesigner for OpenMAX IL clearly paves the way for ongoing innovation in the mobile space. Ultimately the MediaDesigner philosophy is about delivering smart Software Design Kits to all stakeholders, so communities of developers can innovate on the most complex mobile devices, creating the most compelling media-rich user experience.”

For the many organizations that have already made the strategic decision to build solutions based upon OpenMAX IL, MediaDesigner offers the ideal team-based design environment for rapid results. For vendors considering adopting OpenMAX IL, MediaDesigner is the ideal starting point.

About Incoras Solutions
Incoras Solutions is an independent software tools vendor and embedded systems consultancy with its headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. Incoras has extensive experience in embedded multi-media software design and the development and supply of advanced design tools. More information can be found at www.incoras.com

About Khronos and OpenMAX
The Khronos Group was founded in January 2000 by a number of leading media-centric companies, including 3Dlabs, ATI, Discreet, Evans & Sutherland, Intel, NVIDIA, SGI and Sun Microsystems, dedicated to creating open standard APIs to enable the authoring and playback of rich media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Today, The Khronos Group is a member-funded consortium focused on the creation of royalty-free open standards for parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices.

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.

For further information visit www.khronos.org

Khronos Group Releases OpenSL ES 1.0 Specification for Portable Mobile and Embedded Audio Processing

Extensive Audio Functionality now Portable to any Platform and Operating System;
Enhances Audio Capability in the Khronos Mobile Media API Ecosystem

24th March, 2009 – GDC, San Francisco, CA – The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that it has today publicly released the OpenSL ES™ 1.0 specification, a royalty-free, cross-platform C-language API for high-performance, low-latency audio functionality on mobile and embedded devices. The OpenSL ES standard simplifies deployment of hardware and software audio capabilities across any platform or operating system and provides broad audio portability for application developers. The specifications are immediately available for download at http://www.khronos.org/opensles/ and may be used royalty-free by implementers and developers. An Adopters Program for OpenSL ES including extensive conformance tests to ensure cross-implementation consistency and trademark usage by conformant implementations will be released by Khronos during April 2009.

The audio API space is highly fragmented and developers are forced to constantly port their audio code across proprietary or platform-specific APIs as even just playing a simple sound requires different code on different platforms. OpenSL ES fills a void in the audio API arena by enabling standardized, cross-platform access to a native platform’s audio capabilities – not something that APIs such as OpenAL or ALSA were designed to do. OpenSL ES defines standardized access to both basic and advanced features such as MIDI playback and 3D positional audio on any device and operating system and is extensible by implementers to take advantage of emerging audio capabilities. OpenSL ES also provides a portable foundation for implementing the audio portions of higher-level APIs such as JSR 135 and JSR 234.

“As strong proponents of open standards, we expect that OpenSL ES will drive the evolution of enhanced audio in embedded devices with the same impact that the Khronos graphics APIs have driven advanced video and imaging,” said Jörgen Lantto, CTO of ST-Ericsson. “OpenSL ES will open up the handheld market for game developers, and consumers will benefit from a broader and richer gaming experience in their mobile devices.”

“As a founding member of Khronos we have been at the forefront of media API development and have long recognized the importance of open APIs for developers,” said Tim Lewis, director of marketing, ZiiLABS. “OpenSL ES provides a cross-platform foundation to rationalize the wide variety of closed audio development libraries in embedded markets, providing developers and hardware vendors a stable standard to build the market for audio applications and accelerators.”

About OpenSL ES
OpenSL ES is a fully-featured audio API that enables application developers take full control of advanced audio functionality in a device while being isolated from platform specifics, enabling applications to run on a multitude of hardware accelerated and software-based audio solutions. OpenSL ES has been designed by many of the leading industry audio experts to provide access to a broad range of audio functionality:

• Playback of PCM and encoded content, MIDI ringtones and UI sounds, as well as extraction of content metadata;
  
• General audio controls such as volume, rate, and pitch; music player effects such as equalizer, bass boost, preset reverberation and stereo widening; as well as advanced 3D effects such as Doppler, environmental reverberation, and virtualization;
  
• Advanced MIDI including SP-MIDI, mobile DLS, mobile XMF, MIDI messages, and the ability to use the output of the MIDI engine as a 3D sound source;
  
• Full 3D positional audio including grouping of 3D sound sources;
  
• Audio recording in PCM as well as non-PCM formats from a microphone, line-in jack;
  
• Optional support for LED and vibrator control, 3D macroscopic control, and audio recording.

Due to the broad range of audio functionality, OpenSL ES defines three overlapping profiles allowing implementers to select the features required by a particular device while preserving application portability by implementing one or more profiles on a device:

• The Phone profile provides playback controls and volume controls, sound prioritization and MIDI as well as the ability to direct sound to multiple simultaneous outputs;
  
• The Music profile provides balance and pan controls, sound prioritization and audio effects such as virtualization, preset reverberation and equalizer controls;
• The Game profile provides buffer queues, pitch and playback rate control, environmental reverberation and extensive positional 3D audio controls that complements the use of OpenGL ES for 3D graphics in sophisticated mobile applications.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenKODE™, and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

Khronos Releases Streamlined OpenGL 3.1 Specification

Rapid nine month development cycle since OpenGL 3.0; Adds cutting edge GPU functionality and streamlines API; Accelerates convergence with OpenGL ES

24th March, 2009 – GDC, San Francisco, CA – The Khronos™ Group announced today it has publicly released the OpenGL® 3.1 specification that modernizes and streamlines the cross-platform, royalty-free API for 3D graphics. OpenGL 3.1 includes GLSL™ 1.40, a new version of the OpenGL shading language, and provides enhanced access to the latest generation of programmable graphics hardware through improved programmability, more efficient vertex processing, expanded texturing functionality and increased buffer management flexibility. OpenGL 3.1 implementations are expected shortly from multiple vendors. The new OpenGL 3.1 specification and more details are available at www.khronos.org/opengl.

OpenGL 3.1 leverages the evolutionary model introduced in OpenGL 3.0 to dramatically streamline the API for simpler and more efficient software development, and accelerates the ongoing convergence with the widely available OpenGL ES mobile and embedded 3D API to unify application development. The OpenGL 3.1 specification enables developers to leverage state-of-the-art graphics hardware available on a significant number of installed GPUs across all desktop operating systems. According to Dr. Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research, a leading graphics market analyst in California, the installed base of graphics hardware that will support OpenGL 3.1 exceeds 100 million units. OpenGL 3.0 drivers are already shipping on AMD, NVIDIA and S3 GPUs.

Concurrently with the release of the OpenGL 3.1 specification, the OpenGL ARB has released an optional compatibility extension that enables application developers to access the OpenGL 1.X/2.X functionality removed in OpenGL 3.1, ensuring full backwards compatibility for applications that require it.

“The rapid nine month development of OpenGL 3.1 demonstrates the schedule-driven approach to the standard that is enabling and inspiring cutting edge, cross-platform GPU functionality,” said Barthold Lichtenbelt, chair of the OpenGL ARB working group at Khronos. “OpenGL 3.1 answers the requests from the developer community to streamline and modernize the OpenGL API. The OpenGL ARB will continue to leverage the unique evolutionary model introduced in OpenGL 3.0 to drive the ongoing revolution in OpenGL while ensuring backwards compatibility where it is needed.”

OpenGL 3.1 introduces a broad range of significant new features including:

• Texture Buffer Objects - a new texture type that holds a one-dimensional array of texels of a specified format, enabling extremely large arrays to be accessed by a shader, vital for a wide variety of GPU compute applications;
• Signed Normalized Textures – new integer texture formats that represent a value in the range [-1.0,1.0];
• Uniform Buffer Objects - enables rapid swapping of blocks of uniforms for flexible pipeline control, rapid updating of uniform values and sharing of uniform values across program objects;
• More samplers – now at least 16 texture image units must be accessible to vertex shaders in addition to the 16 already guaranteed to be accessible to fragment shaders;
• Primitive Restart – to easily restart an executing primitive, useful for efficiently drawing a mesh with many triangle strips, for example;
• Instancing - the ability to draw objects multiple times by re-using vertex data to reduce duplicated data and number of API calls;
• CopyBuffer API – accelerated copies from one buffer object to another, useful for many applications including those that share buffers with OpenCL™ 1.0 for advanced visual computing applications.

Member Quotes
“AMD will support OpenGL 3.1 in the upcoming driver release for the Radeon and FirePro products, and is fully supportive of the OpenGL API,” said Suki Samra, director of OpenGL at AMD.

“NVIDIA is committed to the rapid adoption of OpenGL 3.1 and we are proud to release our beta drivers on the same day as the specification itself,” said Dan Vivoli, vice president of marketing at NVIDIA.  “OpenGL 3.1 marks over 15 years of tradition in advancing the state-of-the-art for graphics developers.”

About OpenGL
The OpenGL specification enables developers to incorporate a broad set of programmable 3D and 2D graphics rendering and visualization functions, and provides unfettered access to graphics hardware acceleration. Since its introduction by SGI in 1992, OpenGL has become the industry’s most widely used and supported programming interface and is available on all major computer platforms, including Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Overseen by the Khronos Group since 2006, and with broad industry support, OpenGL is a vendor-neutral, multiplatform graphics standard that is uniquely positioned to leverage and drive the continuing evolution of graphics hardware.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenKODE™, and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at http://www.khronos.org.

Khronos Launches Initiative to Create Open Royalty Free Standard for Accelerated 3D on the Web

Open call for industry participation and contributions; Project initiated by Mozilla

24th March, 2009 – GDC, San Francisco, CA – The Khronos™ Group today announced an initiative to create an open, royalty-free standard for bringing accelerated 3D graphics to the Web.  In response to a proposal from Mozilla, Khronos has created an ‘Accelerated 3D on Web’ working group that Mozilla has offered to chair.  This royalty-free standard will be developed under the proven Khronos development process with a target of a first public release within 12 months.  Any interested company is welcome to join Khronos to make contributions, stand for chair, influence the direction of the specification and gain early access to draft specifications before public release.  The working group will consider various approaches including exposing OpenGL and OpenGL ES 2.0 capabilities within ECMAScript.  The Khronos Accelerated 3D on Web working group will commence work during April 2009.  More details on joining Khronos can be found at http://www.khronos.org/members/ or emailing info@khronos.org.

With increasing performance, JavaScript is positioned to be a viable programming language for classes of applications currently written in C and C++.  Graphics developers targeting large audiences through web applications would be well-served by bringing additional graphics capabilities the web platform, particularly the ability to work with 3D.  OpenGL is available on every desktop operating system and a significant and growing percentage of embedded platforms have adopted OpenGL ES as their native graphics API.  As OpenGL is familiar to application developers, the fusion of OpenGL and OpenGL ES capabilities with the web platform holds great promise.  Mozilla has proposed exposing the OpenGL ES 2.0 API and capabilities to an ECMAScript container such as a web browser to enable the development of cross-platform 3D-capable web applications.  The working group will consider this and other proposals and any contributions from other working group members.

“With more and more content moving to the web and JavaScript getting faster every day, the time is right to create an open, general purpose API for accelerated 3D graphics on the web.  Google looks forward to offering its expertise in graphics and web development to this discussion,” said Matt Papakipos, engineering director at Google Inc.

“The industry has been searching for a way to bring dynamic 3D content to everyone’s web browser for many years,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group.  “The convergence of increasing JavaScript performance and pervasive access to accelerated OpenGL and OpenGL ES presents a potentially historic opportunity to make open, general purpose 3D capabilities available to web developers and web browsers everywhere.  We warmly invite any interested company to join Khronos and become involved in this exciting initiative.”

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenKODE™, and COLLADA™.  All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at http://www.khronos.org.

Movial Joins the Khronos Group

Helsinki, FINLAND — December 16, 2008 — Movial, the company that inspires rich, intuitive Internet experiences, today announced it has joined the Khronos™ Group industry consortium. By joining the Khronos Group, Movial continues its ongoing commitment to support the development of open standards—including enabling the acceleration of graphics and multimedia on a wide variety of platforms and devices. The Khronos Group is an open, member-funded consortium committed to developing royalty-free standards for mobile and embedded markets. Movial also announced it is contributing the Movial Octopus Media Engine, multimedia enabling source code to the mobile Linux community. Octopus uses the Khronos Group’s OpenMAX™ standard and enables easy integration of multimedia into different mobile applications. Compared with other open source based media engines which don’t allow developers to use the media engine for any other applications, Octopus delivers revolutionary flexibility, acting as a central point of contact for all multimedia use cases.

The Movial Octopus Media Engine controls audio and video content which can be read from local files or streamed over the network. Octopus provides a higher level API (Application Programming Interface) for end user applications to manage multimedia content. Target applications include media players as well as voice and video call applications for devices such as MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) and Netbooks. Octopus works as a background service that several applications can use simultaneously. For media content operations, such as video calls, Internet streaming and MP3 playback, Octopus uses either GStreamer or OpenMAX IL components.

Developers can immediately download Octopus at http://sandbox.movial.com/wiki/index.php/Octopus. The current client API is a D-Bus API and plans are underway to offer an OpenMAX AL API in 2009.

“Usability and user experience have become critical success factors in today’s mobile market,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group. “Movial brings a wealth of expertise and understanding of user experience design aspects and we look forward to their contributions to the development of open APIs for next generation multimedia devices and services.”

“Movial greatly values the work of the Khronos Group — especially in reducing the fragmentation in the mobile Linux market through open APIs,” said Tomi Rauste, President of Movial Creative Technologies. “Standard, widely adopted interfaces towards graphics and multimedia acceleration allow design and implementation of highly desirable and differentiating user experiences in an open ecosystem.”
A pioneer in mobile Linux-based solutions, Movial harnesses its extensive understanding of mobile user behavior to design personalized user experiences, from device concept and interface design, to systems integration, third-party application integration, and product maintenance and support. The company’s rich and robust Internet Experience Suite, Movial IXS, is available as a white-label product to device manufacturers and operators worldwide.
Movial IXS uses the Khronos Group’s OpenGL® ES standard to accelerate both the user interface as well as rendering of Web content from the Internet. This new way of using graphics allows any content to benefit from graphics hardware, not only the content that was originally developed to utilize it.

“OpenGL ES is not just for fancy games and 3D navigation,” adds Rauste. “All operator services we use and Internet pages we visit daily benefit from the open APIs. OpenGL ES enables us to use graphics and multimedia acceleration in Web browsing, Media Player and IP communication solutions.”

Device manufacturers and operators rely on Movial’s products and custom consulting services to help increase ROI and streamline and speed product development utilizing open Linux platforms and ready-to-use applications. Movial IXS Toolkit, an incredibly easy to use Linux SDK, leverages the existing skills of Web developers and designers to build incredibly fast mobile device User Interfaces. Movial IXS Toolkit lets Web developers use familiar Web publishing tools and the latest Web 2.0, Ajax JavaScript and XML technologies to deliver exciting user interfaces in dramatically shorter timeframes. Movial IXS Toolkit allows operators to bring their own services, such as online music stores and location based services, to the end device.

Movial is an active participant in over 12 Open Source communities. Open Source projects that the company initiated and maintains include Scratchbox, Matrix, D-Bus Bridge and Octopus.

The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenKODE™, and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and can accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

Movial
Movial inspires rich, intuitive Internet experiences for companies embracing transformational technologies. Leveraging its deep expertise in Internet, Linux and mobile devices, Movial seamlessly enables its customers to deliver richer user experiences to millions of people on PCs and on mobile devices. Movial’s device creation, Internet communications applications and design for digital services are generating revenue for industry leaders like ARM, Ericsson, Nokia, Orange, and Telefónica. By delivering highly intuitive and compelling user experiences, Movial has become the trusted source for enriching the way people interact every day. For more information, visit http://www.movial.com.

OpenVG 1.1 Specification Publicly Released by Khronos

Japanese Translation (pdf)

December 9th 2008 – SIGGRAPH Asia, Singapore – The Khronos™ Group announced today that it has ratified and publicly released the OpenVG™ 1.1 specification, a new version of the royalty-free, open standard for low-level 2D vector graphics acceleration. OpenVG 1.1 adds a Glyph API for hardware accelerated text rendering, full acceleration support for Adobe® Flash® and Flash Lite 3 technologies and multi-sampled anti-aliasing. The new OpenVG specification is accompanied by an open source sample implementation and a full suite of conformance tests implemented by the Khronos Group. OpenVG has been developed by Khronos members including Adobe, AMD, ARM, Broadcom, Ericsson, Huone, Imagination Technologies, Monotype Imaging, NDS, Nokia, NVIDIA, Symbian, TAKUMI and Texas Instruments. The OpenVG API specification and more details about the sample implementation and conformance tests are available at http://www.khronos.org/openvg/.

OpenVG defines low-level 2D operations based on Bezier curves to provide hardware acceleration for vector graphics and engines such as such as Adobe Flash and SVG™. OpenVG enables high-quality, anti-aliased, scalable 2D vector graphics and text with highly interactive performance and low levels of power consumption – ideal for embedded and handheld battery-powered devices. The OpenVG Adopters Program maintained by Khronos enables OpenVG implementers to license the OpenVG conformance tests and to license the OpenVG trademark for use with conformant implementations.

Quotes from OpenVG Working Group Members

“As a member of the Khronos Group, Adobe continues to support and believe in open standards to bring better and more consistent computing experiences to consumers worldwide,” said Mahesh Balakrishnan, director of product management and strategy at Adobe. “Adobe is excited about the added support of OpenVG 1.1 in Flash Lite 3, which offers our partners and customers new opportunities to develop rich and powerful Flash-based mobile applications, content and user interfaces.”

“Imagination Technologies has already delivered OpenVG 1.0.1 conformance on our POWERVR MBX and SGX IP cores,” said Tony King-Smith, VP marketing, Imagination Technologies. “We are delighted with today's announcement of OpenVG 1.1. Used alongside OpenGL ES for 3D graphics, OpenVG enables advanced vector graphics for user interfaces and other applications which redefine how 2D is perceived. Imagination is committed to continue to deliver the most efficient, highest performance OpenVG solutions for all our current and future POWERVR graphics cores.”

“NDS is proud to have contributed to the OpenVG 1.1 specification,” said Nick Thexton, NDS senior vice president, R&D, New Initiatives. “This development sets a firm foundation for new kinds of user interaction and an enhanced viewer experience on multiple displays, including meeting the requirements of the growing global HDTV market,” he continued. “This is a big step forward for consumers, and is truly set to change the way people are entertained and informed.”

“As a Khronos member collaborating on this project, our focus was to enable support for a hardware-accelerated text rendering solution,” said Steve Martin, vice president of engineering at Monotype Imaging Inc. “We believe OpenVG 1.1 will help to facilitate the adoption of rich multimedia services on mobile devices in various markets with diverse and complex language requirements. As a result of improved rendering performance and reduced power consumption on handheld devices, we envision that media players, browser applications, user interfaces and other services that rely on textual components will benefit through enhanced user experiences. Monotype Imaging has recently introduced a new version of its scalable font and text rendering solution that supports the OpenVG 1.1 API.”

“We have recognized the increasing sophistication of GUI and other rich content on embedded systems that drives the need for open standards that enable a total graphics solution from IP cores to content creation,” said Koji Iguchi associate senior vice president at NEC System Technologies. “NEC Systems Technologies welcomes the launch of the Khronos Group's OpenVG 1.1 specification and we expect OpenVG will play a key role as the industry standard for vector graphics acceleration and become widely adopted throughout the industry and we will continue to support OpenVG for our GA88 IP cores.”

“TAKUMI welcomes this break-through release of OpenVG 1.1 API that enables embedded and mobile devices to be used in richer and more intuitive operability,” said Hiroyuki Nitta, CTO of TAKUMI. “TAKUMI has contributed so far to rich graphical user interface and games by delivering 'GSHARK-TAKUMI Technology', OpenGL ES 1.1-compliant 3D Hardware graphics accelerator IP cores, to mobile phones and embedded systems. We are committed to enabling new vector graphics applications for various handheld and embedded devices with our current lineup of Vector Graphics Hardware Accelerators and its low power and small footprint architecture.”

OpenVG Briefing at SIGGRAPH ASIA
Representatives from Khronos and the OpenVG Working Group will be presenting an overview of the OpenVG 1.1 specification at the Khronos Developer University at SIGGRAPH Asia in Singapore on 10th December 2008. More details of this free event are available at http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/siggraph_asia_2008.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenCL™, OpenKODE™, and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

The Khronos Group Releases OpenCL 1.0 Specification

December 9th 2008 – SIGGRAPH Asia, Singapore – The Khronos™ Group today announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL™ 1.0 specification, 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. Proposed six months ago as a draft specification by Apple, OpenCL has been developed and ratified by industry-leading companies including 3DLABS, Activision Blizzard, AMD, Apple, ARM, Barco, Broadcom, Codeplay, Electronic Arts, Ericsson, Freescale, HI, IBM, Intel Corporation, Imagination Technologies, Kestrel Institute, Motorola, Movidia, Nokia, NVIDIA, QNX, RapidMind, Samsung, Seaweed, TAKUMI, Texas Instruments and Umeå University. The OpenCL 1.0 specification and more details are available at http://www.khronos.org/opencl/.

“The opportunity to effectively unlock the capabilities of new generations of programmable compute and graphics processors drove the unprecedented level of cooperation to refine the initial proposal from Apple into the ratified OpenCL 1.0 specification,” said Neil Trevett, chair of the OpenCL working group, president of the Khronos Group and vice president at NVIDIA. “As an open, cross-platform standard, OpenCL is a fundamental technology for next generation software development that will play a central role in the Khronos API ecosystem and we look forward to seeing implementations within the next year.”

“We are excited about the industry-wide support for OpenCL,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering. “Apple developed OpenCL so that any application in Snow Leopard, the next major version of Mac OS X, can harness an amazing amount of computing power previously available only to graphics applications.”

OpenCL enables software developers to take full advantage of a diverse mix of multi-core CPUs, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), Cell-type architectures and other parallel processors such as Digital Signal Processors (DSPs). OpenCL consists of an API for coordinating parallel computation and a programming language for specifying those computations. Specifically, the OpenCL standard defines:

• a subset of the C99 programming language with extensions for parallelism;
• an API for coordinating data and task-based parallel computation across a wide range of heterogeneous processors;
• numerical requirements based on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' IEEE 754 standard;
• efficient interoperability with OpenGL, OpenGL ES and other graphics APIs.

Quotes from Working Group Members

Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD said: “AMD believes that broad adoption of industry standards by hardware and software vendors is essential to successfully harnessing the power of stream computing in a wide array of mainstream applications. AMD has consistently supported an open, industry standards approach to stream computing, and is an aggressive proponent of the OpenCL standard. Now that OpenCL 1.0 is ratified, AMD plans to evolve its ATI Stream Software Development Kit to comply with the new specification to give developers, businesses and consumers maximum choice and flexibility in leveraging the computational capabilities of our graphics processors.”

Andrew Richards, chief executive of Codeplay Software Limited, stated: “Codeplay is proud to have contributed to the definition and specification of the OpenCL 1.0 standard. OpenCL 1.0 will play a vital part in opening up the power of Manycore processors and GPUs to developers in many application sectors. This standard will help Codeplay to continue to innovate in production of programming tools for developers targeting the new heterogenous processor architectures, whilst maintaining interoperability with other elements in the development tool-chain. Codeplay plans to implement conformance with OpenCL 1.0 for its award-winning Sieve C++ Manycore Programming Platform during 2009.”

Elliot Garbus, Intel vice president and general manager Visual Computing Software Division said: “Over the years Intel has worked closely with the industry to innovate through open standards and is a long standing member of the Khronos board of promoters. With the introduction of OpenCL, we see new opportunities for developers to innovate through a task- and data-parallel programming environment that can benefit from the performance and flexibility of current and future Intel products.”

Tony King-Smith, vice president of marketing at Imagination Technologies: “Imagination is delighted to have been involved in the authoring of OpenCL, which we see as a significant development for the future of GP-GPU based computing for multimedia.”

Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of technical marketing at NVIDIA stated: “OpenCL adds fuel to the most exciting parallel computational revolution of our generation – GPU Computing. It also provides another powerful way to harness the enormous processing capabilities of our CUDA-based GPUs on multiple platforms.”

Michael McCool, founder and chief scientist at RapidMind said: “As a provider of a high-level parallel programming platform, RapidMind is excited about the availability of a new standard for targeting compute devices through a single API. The low-level access to a variety of devices provided by OpenCL will allow our platform to expand to new devices more quickly than ever before.”

OpenCL Briefing at SIGGRAPH ASIA
Representatives from Khronos and the OpenCL Working Group will be presenting an overview of the OpenCL specification at the Khronos Developer University at SIGGRAPH Asia in Singapore on 10th December 2008. More details of this free event are available at http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/siggraph_asia_2008.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenKODE™, and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

SGI further opens its OpenGL contributions

SGI FURTHER OPENS ITS OPENGL CONTRIBUTIONS

SUNNYVALE, Calif. (Sept. 19, 2008) — As software developers the world over prepare to mark the 25th anniversary of the GNU System, Silicon Graphics, Inc. (NASDAQ: SGIC) today announced it is releasing a new version of the SGI Free Software License B. The license, which now mirrors the free X11 license used by X.Org, further opens previously released SGI® graphics software that has set the industry standard for visualization software and has proven essential to GNU/Linux® and a host of applications.

Today’s announcement affects software created by SGI that forms the building blocks of many elements of today’s gaming, visual computing, and immersive experiential technologies, including a wide range of proven visualization solutions provided by SGI.

Previous SGI contributions to the free and open source community are now available under the new license. These contributions include the SGI® OpenGL® Sample Implementation, the GLX™ API and other GLX extensions. GLX provides the glue connecting OpenGL and the X Window System™ and is required by any OpenGL implementation using X. GLX is vital to a range of free and commercial software, including all major Linux distributions.

SGI first released the software under a licensing model in 1999. But now SGI is pleased to release an updated version of the license that meets the free and open source software community’s widely accepted definition of “free.”

“SGI has been one of the most ardent commercial supporters of free and open source software, so it was important to us that we continue to support the free software development community by releasing our earlier OpenGL-related contributions under this new license,” said Steve Neuner, director of Linux, SGI. “This license ensures that all existing user communities will benefit, and their work can proceed unimpeded. Both Mesa and the X.org Project can continue to utilize this code in free software distributions of GNU/Linux. Now more than ever, software previously released by SGI under earlier GLX and SGI Free Software License B is free.”

Support from Free and Open Source community:

• “We couldn't be happier with this decision, and we're very grateful to SGI for all their assistance,” said Peter Brown, executive director, Free Software Foundation (FSF). "The FSF is committed to ensuring that everyone's computing tasks can be done with free software and this SGI code plays an important role in scientific and design applications and in the latest desktop environments and games." (http://www.fsf.org) ‘
• “Khronos applauds this move by SGI to adopt a new licensing model that will benefit the entire OpenGL community,” said Neil Trevett,president of The Khronos Group, a member-funded industry consortium creating and evolving open standard APIs – including OpenGL. “It takes truly open standards to enable the authoring and playback of rich media on a wide variety of platforms and devices, and today’s announcement shows real support for developers who rely on OpenGL, the planet’s most widely deployed 2D and 3D graphics API.” (http://www.khronos.org)

Additional information:

• Details on Version 2.0 of the SGI Free Software License B are available at: http://oss.sgi.com/projects/FreeB/

SGI | Innovation for Results™

SGI (NASDAQ: SGIC) is a leader in high-performance computing. SGI delivers a broad range of high-performance server, storage and visualization solutions along with industry-leading professional services and support that enable its customers to overcome the challenges of complex data-intensive workflows and accelerate breakthrough discoveries, innovation and information transformation. SGI helps customers solve significant challenges whether it’s enhancing the quality of life through drug research, designing and manufacturing safer and more efficient cars and airplanes, studying global climate change, providing technologies for homeland security and defense, or helping enterprises manage large data. With offices worldwide, the company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., and can be found on the Web at sgi.com.

POWERVR SGX first with conformance for all Khronos mobile APIs on production silicon

London, UK, August 14th 2008: Imagination Technologies, the leader in mobile graphics technologies, reports that POWERVR SGX is the world’s first 3D graphics acceleration solution to achieve conformance on commercially available production silicon for all of the Khronos™ mobile 2D and 3D graphics APIs – OpenGL® ES 2.0, OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenVG™ 1.0—reinforcing POWERVR’s credentials as the leading mobile and embedded graphics acceleration solution.

APIs, or application programming interfaces, enable software applications to use the power of advanced hardware in a high level, well defined and structured way. Conformance was achieved using Texas Instruments’ POWERVR SGX enabled OMAP3430 application processor.

Production-ready SoCs utilising its industry-leading POWERVR SGX graphics acceleration technology are now designed into more than 20 announced MID, UMPC and other board –level products with many more due within the next six to nine months. The first phones capable of delivering OpenGL ES 2.0 support, enabled by POWERVR, will enter the market in Q4 2008.

Imagination’s POWERVR MBX 3D acceleration core is also conformant with Khronos’ OpenVG 1.0.1 and OpenGL ES 1.1 APIs.

POWERVR SGX is currently available in SoCs from Intel, NEC and Texas Instruments, and several further key industry leaders are also committed to POWERVR SGX based platforms.

Says Tony King-Smith, VP marketing, Imagination Technologies: “High performance, fully conformant support for open standards such as the Khronos APIs is a key strength of all of our IP core technologies. The graphics-driven content revolution is being enabled across many markets by the combination of Imagination’s POWERVR hardware and the industry standard Khronos APIs for graphics, which are now available across an ever growing range of operating systems and hardware platforms.”
Says Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group: “We congratulate Imagination on this important trio of conformance achievements – particularly as it is the first organization to achieve certification for OpenGL ES 2.0 based on production silicon. OpenGL ES 2.0 enables fully-programmable 3D graphics on embedded systems. With the support of major suppliers such as Imagination, OpenGL ES 2.0 will usher in a new generation of devices that will enable revolutionary applications, ultimately driving consumer demand.”

Supplementary Information
Imagination’s POWERVR graphics technology, which has been highly optimized for mobile devices, is already deployed in volume SoCs from leading semiconductor manufacturers including Texas Instruments, Renesas, NXP, Freescale, Samsung, SiRF and Intel, with chips from several other manufacturers yet to come.

POWERVR MBX graphics, which supports OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenVG, dominates the market today for graphics acceleration shipping in mobile phones, PMPs, PNDs and MIDs.

POWERVR SGX brings a fully unified shader environment to mobiles, while retaining full compatibility with existing POWERVR MBX applications. Shaders are a technique used extensively in games consoles and other high end graphics platforms for creating advanced effects which enable more realistic and compelling images to be created. Unlike traditional 3D rendering, shaders are programmable, enabling the content developers’ creativity to become the defining factor on the appearance of a game, user interface or other application.

The POWERVR SGX architecture is uniquely scalable, with IP (Intellectual Property) cores in the family targeting entry level handsets, through smartphone and MID, up to netbooks and laptops. The small sizes of the IP cores and the uniquely efficient patented tile-based deferred shading architecture allow chip makers to keep the clock-speed of the core low and memory bandwidth the lowest in the industry, extending battery life.

POWERVR SGX’s patented tiled-based deferred rendering and multi-threaded Universal Scalable Shading Engine (USSETM) keep graphics processing on chip and are critical in ensuring that the POWERVR SGX GPU architecture can deliver optimal performance from any given silicon area or memory subsystem while minimising power consumption by eliminating unnecessary processing.

For further information, please see www.imgtec.com/powervr/powervr-graphics.asp .

About Imagination Technologies
Imagination Technologies Group plc (FTSE:IMG) – a leader in semiconductor System on Chip Intellectual Property (SoC IP) – creates and licenses market-leading embedded
graphics, video and display accelerators, multi-threaded processors and multi-standard receiver technologies. These IP solutions are complemented by dynamic and extensive developer and middleware ecosystems. Target markets include digital radio and audio; mobile phone multimedia; personal media players (PMP); in-car navigation and driver information; personal navigation devices (PND); Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) and Mobile Internet Device (MID); digital TV & set-top box; and mobile TV. Its licensees include leading semiconductor and consumer electronics companies, as well as innovative leading edge start-up and fabless semiconductor companies. Imagination has corporate headquarters in the United Kingdom, with sales and R&D offices worldwide. See: www.imgtec.com.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenKODE™, and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and can accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at www.khronos.org.

Khronos Releases OpenGL 3.0 Specifications

Strong industry support for state-of-the-art OpenGL 3.0 API and GLSL 1.30 shading language specifications on all major platforms; OpenGL evolutionary model to accelerate development of standard; Interoperability with OpenCL being defined

11th August, 2008 – SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles, CA The Khronos™ Group announced today it has released the OpenGL® 3.0 specification with strong industry support to bring significant new functionality to the open, cross-platform standard for 3D graphics acceleration. OpenGL 3.0 includes GLSL™ 1.30, a new version of the OpenGL shading language, and provides comprehensive access to the functionality of the latest generations of programmable graphics hardware. The OpenGL working group has also defined a set of OpenGL 3.0 extensions that expose potential new functionality for the next version of OpenGL that is targeted for release in less than 12 months, and a set of extensions for OpenGL 2.1 to enable much of the new OpenGL functionality on older hardware. Additionally, OpenGL 3.0 introduces an evolutionary model to assist in streamlining the specification and to enable rapid development of the standard to address diverse markets. Finally, the OpenGL working group has announced that it is working closely with the emerging OpenCL standard to create a revolutionary pairing of compute and graphics programming capabilities. The new OpenGL 3.0 specifications are freely available at www.khronos.org/opengl.

The OpenGL 3.0 specification enables developers to leverage state-of-the-art graphics hardware, including many of the graphics accelerators shipped in the last two years both on Windows XP and Windows Vista as well as Mac OS and Linux. According to Dr. Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research, a leading graphics market analyst based in California, the installed base of graphics hardware that will support OpenGL 3.0 exceeds 60 million units. AMD, Intel and NVIDIA have made major contributions to the design of OpenGL 3.0 and today all three companies announced their intent to provide full implementations within their product families. Additionally, the OpenGL working group includes the active participation of leading developers such as Blizzard Entertainment and TransGaming that have played a vital role in ensuring that the specification meets the genuine needs of the software community.

“We are very pleased to see the release of OpenGL 3.0, which includes numerous features and extensions that will help us and other ISVs bring amazing gaming content to OpenGL-based platforms,” commented Gavriel State, founder & CTO of TransGaming, Inc.

OpenGL 3.0 introduces dozens of new features including:

• Vertex Array Objects to encapsulate vertex array state for easier programming and increased throughput;
• non-blocking access to Vertex Buffer Objects with the ability to update and flush a sub-range for enhanced performance;
• full framebuffer object functionality including multi-sample buffers, blitting to and from framebuffer objects, rendering to one and two-channel data, and flexible mixing of buffer sizes and formats when rendering to a framebuffer object;
• 32-bit floating-point textures and render buffers for increased precision and dynamic range in visual and computational operations;
• conditional rendering based on occlusion queries for increased performance;
• compact half-float vertex and pixel data to save memory and bandwidth;
• transform feedback to capture geometry data after vertex transformations into a buffer object to drive additional compute and rendering passes;
• four new texture compression schemes for one and two channel textures providing a factor of 2-to-1 storage savings over uncompressed data;
• rendering and blending into sRGB framebuffers to enable faithful color reproduction for OpenGL applications without adjusting the monitor's gamma correction;
• texture arrays to provide efficient indexed access into a set of textures;
• 32-bit floating-point depth buffer support.

The new version of the OpenGL Shading Language, GLSL 1.30, provides front-to-back native integer operations including full integer-based texturing, integer input and outputs for vertex and fragment shaders and a full set of integer bitwise operators. It also improves compatibility with OpenGL ES, adds new interpolation modes, includes new forms of explicit control over texturing operations, provides additional built-in functions for manipulating floating-point numbers and introduces switch statements for enhanced flow control within shader programs.

The OpenGL working group has also released a set of extensions to OpenGL 3.0 that can be immediately used by developers and, after industry feedback, will potentially be included in the next generation of OpenGL targeted for release in less than 12 months. These extensions include geometry shaders, further instancing support, and texture buffer objects.

Khronos today also released a number of extensions to OpenGL 2.1 which enables some of the new features in OpenGL 3.0 to be used on older generations of hardware. These extensions include enhanced VBOs, full framebuffer object functionality, half float vertices, compressed textures, vertex array objects and sRGB framebuffers.

Additionally, OpenGL 3.0 defines an evolutionary process for OpenGL that will accelerate market-driven updates to the specification. The new OpenGL API supports the future creation of profiles to enable products to support specific market needs while not burdening every implementation with unnecessary costs. To avoid fragmentation, the core OpenGL specification will contain all defined functionality in an architecturally coherent whole, with profiles tightly specifying segment-relevant subsets. OpenGL 3.0 also introduces a deprecation model to enable the API to be streamlined while providing full visibility to the application developer community, enabling the API to be optimized for current and future 3D graphics architectures.

Finally, the OpenGL working group is working closely with the newly announced OpenCL working group at Khronos to define full interoperability between the two open standards. OpenCL is an emerging royalty-free standard focused on programming the emerging intersection of GPU and multi-core CPU compute through a C-based language forheterogeneous data and task parallel computing. The two APIs together will provide a powerful open standards-based visual computing platform with OpenCL’s general purpose compute capabilities intimately combined with the full power of OpenGL.

“OpenGL 3.0 is a significant evolutionary step that integrates new functionality to ensure that OpenGL is a truly state-of-the-art graphics API while supporting a broad swathe of existing hardware,” said Barthold Lichtenbelt, chair of the OpenGL working group at Khronos. “Just as importantly, OpenGL 3.0 sets the stage for a revolution to come – we now have the roadmap machinery and momentum in place to rapidly and reliably develop OpenGL - and are working closely with OpenCL to ensure that OpenGL plays a pivotal role in the ongoing revolution in programmable visual computing.”

More details on OpenGL 3.0 will be discussed at the OpenGL “Birds of a Feather” meeting at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles at 6PM on Wednesday August 13th at the Wilshire Grand Hotel. More details at http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/siggraph_2008_los_angeles_california/.

About OpenGL
The OpenGL specification enables developers to incorporate a broad set of programmable 3D and 2D graphics rendering and visualization functions, and provides unfettered access to graphics hardware acceleration. Since its introduction by SGI in 1992, OpenGL has become the industry’s most widely used and supported programming interface and is available on all major computer platforms, including Windows, Linux and Mac OS. Controlled by the Khronos Group since 2006, and with broad industry support, OpenGL is a vendor-neutral, multiplatform graphics standard that is uniquely positioned to leverage and drive the continuing evolution of graphics hardware.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenKODE™, and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and can accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

Digia joins Khronos Group as a Contributing Member

Digia joins the Khronos Group as a Contributing Member to support the evolution of open standards that enable the authoring and acceleration of UI graphics, games and media on a wide variety of platforms and devices, such as mobile phones. Khronos is an open, member-funded consortium committed to developing royalty-free standards for mobile and embedded markets. Khronos has extensive membership from all aspects of the mobile industry including carriers, handset OEMs, middleware vendors, games developers and semiconductor providers.

“Desire for advanced graphics and seamless mobile multimedia experience has driven wide adoption of enhanced handsets and services, and we are pleased to see Digia join Khronos to contribute to the development of open APIs for the next generation of multimedia devices,” says Matti Paavola, OpenMAX AL Work Group Chair.  “Digia will be able to participate in the development of open multimedia standards such as OpenGL ES and OpenMAX, and now they have “members only” access to specifications under development to enable them to get their solutions to market even more rapidly.”

Tuukka Turunen, Director, Special Projects from Digia continues: "We have seen how much hardware accelerated graphics and media improve the user experience in smart mobile devices. Having immediate reaction to user interaction and visually pleasing graphics is becoming the basic requirement in mobile phones. We believe that the best way to realize this is via open standards."

Digia has worked in creating state of the art mobile multimedia solutions for over a decade, and built solutions for several Khronos standards such as OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX and OpenVG. By joining the Khronos Group Digia gains access to numerous standards, non-public material including work in progress, and right to participate standardization committees.

Digia in brief
Digia delivers information and communication technology solutions worldwide. Our strength in smart mobile devices and real-time information systems enable a mobile life. Our clients are entities who want to capitalise on digital information in their business. New technologies well thought usability and modern service channels enable real time access for correct information or services through their computer, a mobile handset or any other digital device.

We are based in the Nordics, operating globally and employing over 1,300 professionals. We are listed on the OMX Nordic Exchange Helsinki (DIG1V).

The Khronos Group in brief
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenKODE™, and COLLADA™.  All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and can accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at www.khronos.org.

Khronos Releases COLLADA 1.5.0 Specification with New Automation, Kinematics, and Geospatial Functionality

COLLADA expands into new markets and widens adoption among leading content-creation software packages; Support for COLLADA 1.4 continues in parallel with COLLADA 1.5 development

5th August, 2008 – Beaverton, ORThe Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that it has released the new COLLADA™ 1.5.0 specification, which includes significant new functionality to further broaden the applicability of this leading standard for 3D digital asset exchange.  The expanded functionality includes B-reps (boundary representations) and kinematics for CAD, automation, and interactive entertainment applications, and georeferencing of geospatial assets for GIS and mapping software.  Following the lead of early adopters like SOFTIMAGE®|XSI®, Google SketchUp, and NVIDIA FX Composer 2, many authoring packages have now added support for importing and exporting COLLADA assets, including Autodesk® 3ds Max® and Maya®, Crytek CryENGINE® 2, AMD RenderMonkey™, Adobe® Photoshop® CS3 Extended, Harris Inscriber® G7™, and virtual world applications including Vivaty and SceneCaster.  Khronos has also released the COLLADA 1.4.1 2nd Edition specification and is planning a Conformance suite for COLLADA 1.4 for release in 2008.  The new COLLADA specifications are publicly available at www.khronos.org/collada.

The new B-rep and kinematics functionality in COLLADA 1.5 is unprecedented in a royalty-free standard and enables COLLADA to be adopted by the AutomationML group, a consortium of automotive industry leaders that includes Daimler and ABB, as the intermediate language for CAD automation work flows.  COLLADA 1.5 also provides a new OpenGL® ES 2.0 effects profile and enhanced support for external shader effects systems, enabling a wider range of content authoring tools for game developers using frameworks such as Microsoft® XNA™ with DirectX®.

Additionally, for important disciplines such as GIS, COLLADA now supports accurate geo-referencing of geospatially defined assets for those who wish to blend real and virtual 3D assets. With Google's participation in the COLLADA working group, a new file format extension called .zae (Zipped Asset Exchange) has been introduced in COLLADA 1.5. This archive format extension was motivated by Google to include zipped COLLADA models and their assets in the Google 3D Warehouse, often created in their popular SketchUp 3D modeling tool. Says Mark Limber of Google, "as more applications support COLLADA the world of 3D content is becoming more open and accessible, and Google is pleased to support this effort."

Khronos will continue to support COLLADA 1.4 for existing users while developing the COLLADA 1.5 XML schema features for new markets.  Consequently, the Khronos Group also today announced the availability of the COLLADA 1.4.1 2nd Edition specification.  This updated specification release includes corrections, clarifications, and minor additions to the documentation for the widely used COLLADA 1.4 standard.  The updated specification includes enhanced explanations for transparency, animation, lighting, splines, and skinning. 

The COLLADA working group is planning a fourth-quarter release of the Conformance Test Suite for COLLADA 1.4 that comprises a complete GUI and scripting framework that integrates testing methodology with authoring tools and rendering applications and contains up to 500 COLLADA-based content test cases.

“As more and more applications support COLLADA, the world of 3D content is becoming more open and accessible,” said Mark Limber, SketchUp product manager at Google.  “Google is pleased to participate in and support this important effort.”

“Softimage is dedicated to cutting edge technology that leverages open source standards to bring complete solutions to customer problems,” said Marc Stevens, general manager of Softimage, and vice president of AVID Technology, Inc. “As such, we see COLLADA as a key strategic component of our future. COLLADA is the only true open format that facilitates 3D data interchange.  The latest release adds many features, including a referenced texture archive and support for real-time shaders—exemplifying how COLLADA is leading the way in open workflows. Softimage recently implemented a rich content pipeline to the Crytek, CryENGINE®2, based completely on a COLLADA interchange; we’re fully committed to supporting the advancement of the COLLADA standard, which delivers the most productive work-flows for our SOFTIMAGE|XSI customers.”

“COLLADA 1.5 is a very significant release as it contains new functionality that enables completely new industries to use COLLADA – as well as expanding the use of this widely used standard in its traditional content-creation markets,” said Neil Trevett, President of Khronos. “The industry momentum of COLLADA has now reached a critical tipping point – it has become a genuine lingua franca for 3D designers everywhere.”

See COLLADA at SIGGRAPH 2008, Los Angeles

SIGGRAPH 2008 | Thursday, 14 August | 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm | LACC - Room 511A

This year’s COLLADA BOF (Birds of a Feather) offers an exciting array of speakers who will talk about their work in gaming and visualization, demonstrate some cool new content creation tools, and even show COLLADA used for communicating with 3D digital printers for the first time! Expect to hear almost a dozen presenters at the Siggraph COLLADA BOF.  Sign up to attend at: http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/siggraph_2008_los_angeles_california/

About COLLADA
COLLADA is an XML-based schema for digital asset exchange that enables the use of diverse digital-content-creation tools to author sophisticated assets for use by 3D applications, including graphics, animation, kinematics, physics, and shader effects. COLLADA represents authored data in multiple forms, enabling the transformation of assets as they journey from content tools that use high-level descriptions to run-time applications that require optimized, platform-specific representations. The COLLADA specification, documentation, and sample code is available at the Khronos.org website at www.khronos.org/collada.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenKODE™, and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and can accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

Khronos Launches Heterogeneous Computing Initiative

June 16th 2008 – San Francisco, CA – The Khronos™ Group announced today the formation of a new Compute Working Group to create royalty-free, open standards for programming heterogeneous data and task parallel computing across GPUs and CPUs. The creation of this open standard is intended to enable and encourage diverse applications to leverage all available platform compute resources on a wide range of platforms. Initial participants in the working group include 3Dlabs, AMD, Apple, ARM, Codeplay, Ericsson, Freescale, Graphic Remedy, IBM, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Nokia, NVIDIA, Motorola, QNX, Qualcomm, Samsung, Seaweed, TI, and Umeå University. Any company is welcome to join the Khronos Group to participate in this and the other Khronos working groups that are creating an ecosystem of open standards for graphics and media authoring and acceleration. For more details please visit www.khronos.org.

The Compute Working Group will follow proven Khronos processes and invite member contributions as a basis for standardization efforts. Apple has proposed the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) specification to enable any application to tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU and CPU resources through an approachable C-based language. A widely available open-standard compute programming specification with high-performance, general computation support and robust numerics will complement existing solutions and further liberate GPU-based compute power from the realm of graphics-only applications and provide a multi-vendor, portable interface for coordinating all the many-core GPUs and multi-core CPUs within a system. Such capability will have broad applicability - including a central role in the Khronos API ecosystem by providing a powerful compute front-end to OpenGL and OpenGL ES, and a platform for accelerating tasks such as physics and image processing / recognition.

“The Compute Working Group potentially will be one of the most significant standardization efforts at Khronos. Highly-accelerated parallel computation across GPUs and CPUs is essential to many emerging rich consumer applications that will transform the computing experience of diverse users,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group. “Significantly, this initiative is aimed at both desktop and embedded devices – the day when you will be able to hold a supercomputer in the palm of your hand is perhaps not so far away.”

Representatives from Khronos and the Compute Working Group will be available in person for briefings at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles, 11-15th August 2008. Contact Elizabeth Riegel at the contact information above for appointments.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenKODE™, and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

TransGaming Joins Industry Leaders as Khronos Group Member

Toronto, Canada – (Khronos Group March 28, 2008) - TransGaming Inc. (TSX-V: TNG), a leading developer of portability and graphics technologies has become a Khronos™ Group Contributing Member, joining over one hundred industry leading technology companies.  TransGaming will participate and vote with all Members in the ongoing development and promotion of open standards for the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on platforms ranging from embedded systems to high-performance desktop and workstation systems.

“We are delighted that TransGaming has joined the Khronos Group, bringing valuable software vendor perspective to the desktop OpenGL standards process,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA.  “The experience and hard work of members like TransGaming enable Khronos to push forward the OpenGL standard to enable even richer 3D applications across a wide variety of platforms.”

TransGaming is a premier entertainment and graphics software provider widely recognized for the Cider and Cedega Portability Engines. All of TransGaming’s portability products rely heavily on OpenGL to provide a robust and high performance standard graphics interface on targeted platforms.  The company has substantial experience working with OpenGL and brings extensive technical knowledge of game-engine technology and graphics systems to Khronos and the OpenGL ARB.

“TransGaming has joined the Khronos Group to help advance and influence the OpenGL standard. Through Khronos TransGaming will aid the evolution of OpenGL, which is critical to the success of our gaming and entertainment products.  As a contributing member, we will participate in the evolution of these open standard APIs to ensure that all ISVs are able to take full advantage of the capabilities of their hardware, regardless of their platform of choice,” commented Gavriel State, Founder and CTO of TransGaming.

TransGaming is ‘Broadening the Playing Field’ for consumer technologies, and working with Khronos will ensure development standards continue to enable products that meet or exceed consumer demands. 

About TransGaming, Inc.
TransGaming Inc. (TSX-V: TNG), is a leader in the development of unique software portability products that facilitate the deployment of games across multiple platforms. TransGaming’s portability technologies significantly reduce the time-to-market for and costs associated with multi-platform game releases.  TransGaming works with many of the industry’s leading developers and publishers to enable their games on the Mac and Linux operating systems, and currently markets its products under four brand names: Cider (Mac), Cedega (Linux), SwiftShader (Graphics), and GameTreeOnline.com (Retail).  TransGaming is headquartered in Toronto, Canada and maintains a research and development center in Ottawa, Canada.  To learn more about TransGaming’s products visit http://www.transgaming.com.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

Khronos Releases OpenKODE 1.0 Royalty-Free Standard

Multiple conformant implementations shipping; Free development SDKs available; Support from Operators and Handset OEMs; Open source OpenKODE Project announced

February 11th 2008- Mobile World Congress - Barcelona, Spain – The Khronos™ Group announced today that it has publicly released the final OpenKODE™ 1.0 specification, a royalty-free, cross-platform open standard that bundles a set of native APIs to provide increased source portability for rich media and graphics applications. Khronos is also releasing a full conformance test suite for OpenKODE 1.0 to enable conformant implementations to use the OpenKODE trademark.  Multiple Khronos members are demonstrating fully conformant OpenKODE implementations at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and are offering free development SDKs. Khronos has also announced a supportive collaboration with the FreeKODE Project to create an open source version of OpenKODE.  An OpenKODE whitepaper and the OpenKODE 1.0 specification is available for download at www.khronos.org/openkode/.  The specification may be used royalty-free by implementers and developers.

Mobile developers routinely need to maintain hundreds of source versions for every application to handle functional differences between handsets, resulting in significantly increased porting and testing costs, and slowing innovation.  Additionally, the interaction between multiple graphics and media APIs is typically not defined, hindering the development of innovative mixed-media user interfaces and applications.  The bundle of native, royalty-free APIs in OpenKODE 1.0 helps solve these problems.

“The usability of the Apple iPhone has already had a major impact on the mobile industry, and now consumers demand compelling and highly functional user interfaces and applications which, in turn demand highly-integrated graphics acceleration architectures,” said analyst Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research. “Khronos is to be applauded for creating an open standard that not only tackles the problem of mobile platform fragmentation head on, but also delivers an open architecture that can provide a low-level media processing foundation for a wide range of software platforms such as Windows Mobile, Brew, Symbian UIQ, S60, Limo, Google Android and WIPI – all of which need to deliver stunning rich media in the palm of your hand.”

The new OpenKODE Core API is a small and light abstraction layer that will be familiar to POSIX and C programmers for accessing operating system resources while minimizing source changes when porting applications between Linux, Rex/Brew, Symbian, Windows Mobile, WIPI and RTOS-based platforms.  OpenKODE Core provides advanced functionality, such as multi-threading under an event-driven architecture; while being carefully designed to provide real-world portability to a wide variety of mobile platforms.  An OpenKODE Core library is typically under 100KB in size.

“OpenKODE will play a key role in the development of rich media applications and services in the Korean market, as this new standard is extremely complementary to WIPI-GIGA and other software platforms,” said Hoo-Jong Kim, Head of Mobile Device Development Team, SK Telecom. “As an operator and Khronos Board member, we strongly welcome the reduction in platform fragmentation and the increase in rich media acceleration that the OpenKODE standard provides.”

OpenKODE 1.0 also defines a state-of-the-art media-stack architecture by bringing together the Khronos OpenGL® ES and OpenVG™ media APIs through EGL 1.3 plus a set of EGL extensions for acceleration of mixed 3D and vector 2D graphics. OpenKODE will use upcoming versions of EGL to integrate synchronization and data processing of streaming media using the OpenSL ES™ and OpenMAX™ media APIs to provide accelerated video and audio functionality that is fully integrated with graphics processing; for accelerating a wide variety of software including 3D user interfaces and games, Flash and SVG players, TV and video applications and media players.  Through the relevant JSRs, OpenKODE can also provide acceleration for Java as well as native applications.

“OpenKODE Core has been designed by a group of companies within the Khronos Group that have the in-depth experience to provide state-of-the-art functionality in a way that is genuinely portable over a wide range of mobile platforms.  OpenKODE will protect developers from having to gain that same encyclopedic knowledge the hard way,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, chairman of the OpenKODE working group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA.  “NVIDIA is using the OpenKODE standard to deliver the full power and flexibility of our new generation of application processors.  We are showing a fully conformant OpenKODE, including fully accelerated OpenGL ES and OpenVG seamlessly integrated through EGL, here in Barcelona on the new NVIDIA APX 2500.”

All APIs included in a conformant OpenKODE implementation must pass the individual conformance tests defined for that API – including OpenKODE Core.  In addition, OpenKODE defines a set of trans-API conformance tests to ensure that the media APIs and EGL correctly provide the specified mixed media functionality - an important factor in genuinely reducing platform fragmentation for application developers.  The OpenKODE conformance test suite has been created by Futuremark Corporation under contract to Khronos and is available through the Khronos Group OpenKODE Adopters program – more details here www.khronos.org/adopters/.

“OpenKODE is a significant advance for the handheld industry as it combines the Khronos industry-leading media APIs into a reliable set of functionality that can provide great native performance on mobile devices while reducing fragmentation from the software developers’ point of view,” said Tero Sarkkinen, CEO of Futuremark. “Futuremark has been delighted to play a key role in the industry roll-out of OpenKODE and to apply our considerable expertise in performance measurement software development and functionality testing to create the OpenKODE conformance tests.”

In a separate announcement today, Antix Labs announced an agreement with Motorola for its Game Player client for Motorola UIQ devices implementing the OpenKODE 1.0 specification.

“The fragmented, device-specific nature of native multimedia content has been destroying the mobile industry’s economics; OpenKODE takes major steps to reduce that fragmentation and encourages publishers and developers to improve and deploy more attractive services,” said Tim Renouf, OpenKODE specification editor and systems architect at Antix Labs. “The Antix Game Player, Antix’s cross-platform, binary portable, native solution for mobile gaming, supporting the OpenKODE specification, is being demonstrated at both Mobile World Congress and Game Developer Conference.”

Today Acrodea has announced it is releasing development versions of OpenKODE 1.0 for Windows and Mac OS X which are freely available for developers.  The implementations are available at
http://www.acrodea.co.jp/en/openkode.  Acrodea has also announced it is porting OpenKODE to the Brew platform.

“OpenKODE is a long-awaited solution that genuinely helps resolve problems such as platform fragmentation and media API interoperability among mobile platforms. Acrodea has actively participated in the OpenKODE standardization work from the very beginning and is extremely   pleased with the specification being now ratified and by being able to deliver one of the first, fully-conforming OpenKODE implementations to the market. By maximizing the usage of Khronos APIs, such as OpenKODE and OpenGL ES, Acrodea believes it can minimize time-to-market of its product portfolio and enable more sophisticated user experiences on all major mobile platforms,” said Yoshi Kuniyoshi, CTO and executive vice president of Acrodea.

OpenKODE will be a fertile foundation for innovative and differentiated solutions that go beyond the specification itself – such as middleware platforms that enable the distribution of a single binary across multiple handsets.

“Ideaworks3D has enormous experience in using smart technology to solve mobile fragmentation problems. We’ve offered Khronos strong support through the evolution of OpenKODE 1.0, and have been intimately involved in the design of the OpenKODE Core API. At Mobile World Congress this year we are proudly presenting Airplay 3.5, a single-binary native execution environment which is declared to be conformant with OpenKODE 1.0 on a huge number of platforms,” said Alex Caccia, CEO Ideaworks3D Ltd.

An independent initiative to implement a full open-source version of OpenKODE – FreeKODE - is underway on SourceForge http://sourceforge.net/projects/freekode/. Khronos supports and encourages open source projects based on its API specifications – including providing access to its conformance tests to enable conformant open source implementations.

“We see OpenKODE as an effort to close a critical gap in the consolidation of cross-platform native multimedia development. FreeKODE aims to provide free OpenKODE implementations for a variety of platforms with the help of the open-source community. Using FreeKODE, developers will soon be able to design and build native multimedia applications on the PC, taking advantage of mature development tools, while at the same time target all available OpenKODE compatible platforms,” said Diogo Teixeira, project manager for the FreeKODE Project.

“Some of the recent device launches have heightened consumer expectations for user experience, design, and advanced applications. By helping to reduce porting costs and enabling standardized access to a rich set of media and graphics APIs, OpenKODE provides developers the ability to bring these services and user experience much faster to the user,” says Ryu Koriyama, CEO of Aplix Corporation.  “Aplix is pleased to see the public release of the OpenKODE 1.0 specification. Aplix has been an active participant and contributor to the specification from a very early stage and we plan to integrate OpenKODE support into our product portfolio including the industry leading JBlend product which has been deployed in more than 397 million handsets.”

“As an active working group member, we are very excited to be a part of the announcement of the long-needed OpenKODE 1.0 specification.  We believe this innovative work will open the door wide for us to innovate next-generation applications and services for diverse mobile platforms with dramatically reduced porting costs,” said Hirotaka Suzuki, CTO of HI Corporation.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenGL®, glFX™, OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenWF™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at www.khronos.org.

Khronos Group Releases OpenMAX AL 1.0 and OpenSL ES 1.0 Specifications

Two royalty-free API standards bring advanced, holistically-designed video, audio and image acceleration to diverse operating systems and embedded devices; Provisional specifications encourage developer feedback while maximizing industry momentum.

2nd October, 2007 – ARM Developers’ Conference – Santa Clara, CA – The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that it has publicly released provisional versions of the OpenMAX™ AL 1.0 and OpenSL ES™ 1.0 specifications to enable widespread developer feedback and rapid industry implementation of these important new standards that are designed to bring portable, state-of-the-art audio, video and image acceleration to mobile handsets and embedded devices.  Numerous Khronos members have participated in the creation of these standards including AMD, Beatnik, Broadcom, Coding Technologies, Creative, Ericsson, Freescale, Nokia, NVIDIA, QSound Labs, Symbian, STMicroelectronics, Samsung, Sky Mobile Media, Sonaptic and Texas Instruments and multiple implementations are underway with both APIs expected to be implemented in commercial devices in 2008. The specifications are available for download at http://www.khronos.org/opensles/ and http://www.khronos.org/openmaxal/ and may be used royalty-free by implementers and developers.

Khronos expects both specifications to be finalized by mid-2008 after integration of industry feedback and completion of conformance tests to enable conformant implementations to use Khronos trademarks.  Feedback and comments from the mobile and embedded industries are encouraged on the Khronos technical message boards at http://www.khronos.org/message_boards/ or directly by email to opensl_es_feedback@khronos.org and openmax_al_feedback@khronos.org.

OpenSL ES and OpenMAX AL were designed in close conjunction such that the two APIs expose common functionality, e.g. basic audio playback, in a consistent way - enabling applications to easily use whichever API is available. OpenSL ES is compatible with, and can provide acceleration for higher-level audio standards, including Java API JSR-234 (Advanced Multimedia Supplements).

OpenSL ES – Enhanced Audio for Mobile Games, Music and Phone
OpenSL ES is a royalty-free, cross-platform open standard for advanced audio processing on embedded and mobile devices to enable highly portable applications that integrate audio functionality including UI sounds, music playback, ring-tones and full 3D games.  OpenSL ES simplifies the development of sophisticated audio-enabled applications with a comprehensive feature-set including sampled audio, SP-MIDI, Mobile XMF, metadata extraction, and equalization, as well as more advanced functionality such as MIDI messaging, 3D positional audio, reverberation and virtualization. OpenSL ES enables application portability by providing a consistent interface to a wide variety of audio architectures on multiple operating systems, and defines phone, music and game profiles to enable diverse devices to implement relevant audio functionality, while minimizing functional fragmentation.

OpenMAX AL - High-Level Streaming Media Acceleration
OpenMAX AL is a royalty-free, cross platform open standard for accelerating the capture and presentation of audio, video and images in multimedia applications on embedded and mobile devices. OpenMAX AL includes the ability to create and control player and recorder objects and to connect them to configurable inputs and output objects including content readers/writers, audio inputs/outputs, display windows, cameras, analog radios, LEDs, and vibra devices. In addition, OpenMAX AL supports extensive controls for various digital camera settings and RDS/RBDS functionality for analog radio.  OpenMAX AL is the highest tier of the OpenMAX family of multimedia interfaces and provides simplified, operating system-agnostic, programmer-friendly interfaces to developers for accelerating the majority of streaming media applications.  While OpenMAX AL is an independent, stand-alone API standard, it has also been designed to be efficiently implemented over the lower-level OpenMAX IL API that provides configurability of multimedia chains and is intended primarily for use by system integrators.

Member Quotes
“The OpenSL ES specification represents the collaborative effort of key industry representatives to create a significant new audio standard,” said Dr Nathan Charles, chair of the OpenSL ES working group and software architect at Creative Labs. “Creative initiated the creation of the OpenSL ES working group within Khronos and remains committed to the widespread adoption of OpenSL ES.”

“The Khronos APIs and technologies will be a key factor driving the next-generation of rich media experiences on mobile devices,” said Andrej Zdravkovic, senior director for software development at AMD.  “AMD is continuing to demonstrate its commitment to enabling open standards by chairing the OpenMAX IL and OpenVG working groups, being a co-lead spec editor on OpenMAX AL and supporting these standards in future Imageon multimedia processors.”

“Beatnik is already supplying OpenMAX IL compliant implementations of our industry standard mobileBAE software audio engine to mobile handset and platform providers,” said Russell Tillit, Beatnik’s vice president of engineering.  “By delivering technology that fully meets the demands of the OpenSL ES framework we are enabling handset manufacturers to reduce integration time as they bring to market products incorporating advanced audio capabilities and services across a range of hardware, software and operating system platforms.”

“As one of the promoters of the Khronos group, Ericsson believes that OpenSL ES and OpenMAX AL will reach the same level of industry adoption as the previously released Khronos specifications,” said Björn Ekelund, vice president product management, Ericsson Mobile Platforms. “Both operators and handset manufacturers will benefit from these new standards, since they will widen the market for developers of creative applications as well as serving as consistent interfaces in Ericsson’s product line of cost-efficient multimedia-rich mobile platforms.”

“NVIDIA is delighted to see the release of the OpenSL ES and OpenMAX AL specifications as they complete Khronos’ family of embedded acceleration APIs to enable rich mixed-media applications,” said Neil Trevett, vice president mobile content at NVIDIA and president of the Khronos Group. “NVIDIA has chaired the OpenMAX AL working group and will be strongly supporting these open standards on our range of mobile application processors.”

“At QSound, we are firm believers in the benefits of making open, royalty free API’s available to content developers and accordingly, are happy to have participated in the creation of these new standards,” stated David Gallagher, President and CEO of QSound Labs. “QSound will be supporting these standards in its mobile audio solution, microQ.”

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenGL®, glFX™, OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenWF™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at www.khronos.org.

COLLADA 3D Asset Intermediate Standard Accelerates Adoption and is to be Extended for 2D Vector Graphics

Many leading authoring packages add support for COLLADA; Specification to be extended to add support for vector graphics assets such as fonts; Documentation update released; Conformance Tests nearing fourth quarter release; COLLADA Contest Details Announced

7th August, 2007 – SIGGRAPH - San Diego, CA – The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that industry momentum of the COLLADA™ standard for 3D asset interchange format continues to grow rapidly with significant standardization activity and widening industry adoption.  Many authoring packages have now added support for importing and exporting COLLADA assets including: Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended, Agency9 MADLIX, Anark Core Platform, Caligari trueSpace 7.5, DAZ Productions DAZ|Studio 1.7, E Frontier Poser 7, Google Sketchup 6, NVIDIA FX Composer 2, Omegame Menus Master, Remograph Remo3D 1.3.1, Terathon C4 Game Engine and Wordweaver DX Studio 2.0.4.  In addition the Khronos COLLADA working group has initiated extending COLLADA to include 2D vector graphics assets, such as high quality fonts, enabling authoring of user interfaces and scenes that seamlessly mix 2D and 3D assets in a unified geometry and effects environment.
“COLLADA answers a tremendous industry need,” said Stephen Collins, CEO of Anark Corporation. “The challenge of maintaining an industry-wide standard is enormous in light of the growing number of users and the complexity of the data they are exchanging. At Anark we have experienced this problem first hand as our clients struggle to exchange mission critical product design data and other 3D graphics assets. We developed the Anark Core platform to enhance design, collaboration and communication applications, and we chose COLLADA as a key ingredient in our product strategy. This provides our customers with a dependable exchange format that they can count on.”
“COLLADA has been instrumental in making FX Composer 2 the power house shader tool it is today. By enabling a tight coupling of 3D scenes, materials and shader effects, graphics developers and technical artists can create complex surface and full-scene renderings that can be interchanged with game engines and other digital content creation applications,” said Sebastien Domine, director of developer technology tools at NVIDIA.
2D Vector Graphics Assets in COLLADA
The COLLADA UI initiative within the COLLADA working group is extending the COLLADA standard to support high-quality, Bezier-based vector graphics, such as fonts, on an equal basis to 3D geometry. This will enable the seamless authoring of scenes and user interfaces that mix 2D and 3D assets with all the power of the COLLADA format, including animation, skinning, inverse kinematics and programmable shaders.  Khronos invites any company interested in this initiative to consider joining Khronos to participate in this and any other Khronos working group.
“Omegame has joined Khronos to help bring enhanced 2D vector assets to COLLADA, leveraging more than ten years of UI design experience,” said Nicolas Perret, associate managing director and Technical Director of Omegame. “COLLADA UI will create the foundation for authoring mixed 2D and 3D assets in flexible and powerful ways that have not been possible before.  For example, being able to import a high quality font and use it with advanced geometry and shader effects will open up many new application and user interface opportunities.”
COLLADA Conformance Tests and Documentation
The COLLADA working group is planning a fourth quarter release of the Conformance Test Suite for COLLADA 1.4.1.  The COLLADA Conformance Test Suite is a complete GUI and scripting framework that integrates testing methodology with authoring tools and rendering applications and contains up to 500 COLLADA BASIC test cases.
At Siggraph, the Khronos Group also announced the availability of the updated Release Notes Revision B for COLLADA 1.4.1.  The new release notes include highlighted corrections and additions to the current release note for COLLADA. The topics covered include transparency, animation, lighting, splines, and skinning.
“As COLLADA continues to evolve and include more features such as physics and complex shading effects, it is critical that applications keep up and be tested accordingly,” says Christian Laforte, President of Feeling Software.  “For that reason,” he adds, “Feeling Software has collaborated with Khronos to develop the COLLADA Conformance Test Suite. The CTS will ensure that COLLADA-compliant tools are tested rigorously and objectively. Already, more than 300 test scenes have been developed and verified across popular COLLADA-compatible tools like ColladaMaya, ColladaMax and the Feeling Viewer.
COLLADA Contest
Khronos today also announced details of the COLLADA Contest that will enable and encourage open source COLLADA conditioning programs to be written to interface with the COLLADA Refinery and uploaded onto Sourceforge.  The contest is intended to encourage a growing body of open source conditioners to enable any developer to construct sophisticated processing pipelines to condition content for diverse platforms.  The COLLADA working group will select outstanding uploads to be awarded prizes on a regular basis.  Further details are at http://www.ColladaContest.com.
See COLLADA at SIGGRAPH 2007, San Diego; August 7-9 2007
Developers and members of the press are invited to visit the Khronos Booth #227 to see COLLADA demonstrations by Khronos Group members and to attend COLLADA events:

• COLLADA BOF & Party:- August 8th; 2:00-4:45PM Room 2
• COLLADA Crawl Contest: August 7-9; SIGGRAPH Show floor

More details at http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/san_diego_siggraph_2007/

About COLLADA
COLLADA is an XML-based asset interchange format that enables the use of diverse digital content creation tools to author sophisticated assets for use by 3D applications, including animation, shaders and physics effects.  COLLADA represents authored data in multiple forms, enabling the transformation of assets as they journey from content tools that use high-level descriptions to run-time applications that require optimized, platform-specific representations.  The COLLADA specification, documentation, and sample code is available on the Khronos.org website at http://www.khronos.org/collada
About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenGL®, OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices.  All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at http://www.khronos.org.

SoftBank Mobile Joins the Khronos Group

SoftBank Mobile enabled to influence and promote open media standards for mobile devices - including OpenKODE adopted as part of SoftBank Mobile’s new POP-i platform

7th August, 2007 – SIGGRAPH - San Diego, CA – The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that SoftBank Mobile Corporation of Japan has joined the Khronos Group as a Contributing member.  In May 2007 SoftBank Mobile announced their adoption of Khronos’ OpenKODE standard for advanced graphics and media processing in its new Portable Open Platform Initiative (POP-i) platform for mobile phones.  Now, as a member of Khronos, SoftBank Mobile will be able to contribute to and vote on the development of OpenKODE and any other Khronos specifications as they are being created and evolved.
“We have been impressed by the Khronos Group’s proven ability to define advanced standards for mobile media acceleration, deliver them quickly to meet emerging market needs – and to prevent fragmentation within its standards to provide a stable programming environment,” said Hiroshi Ohta, executive vice president, product and service development, SoftBank Mobile.  “We have confidence that Khronos will continue to provide the foundation specifications for advanced media acceleration that will enable us to create a thriving developer community for the POP-i platform - and we are pleased to announce that we are joining Khronos to support and encourage its ongoing activities and the OpenKODE standard.”
“We are delighted that SoftBank Mobile has decided to join the Khronos Group to provide their support and insights into the evolution of OpenKODE and other Khronos standards,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA.  “A deep understanding of operator requirements is vital to ensure that our specifications continue to meet real-world market needs.  Khronos is working hard to be an effective forum for the silicon, handset, software and operator communities to come together effectively to create open standards that generate market opportunities for the entire mobile industry.”

See Khronos at SIGGRAPH 2007, San Diego; August 7-9 2007
Any members of the press and industry are invited to visit the Khronos Booth #227 to see demonstrations by Khronos Group members and to attend these Khronos events:

SIGGRAPH Course “3D Ecosystem” Tuesday 8:30 AM – 5:00 PM – Conference room 4
Khronos Handheld API BOFs: Tuesday 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM – Conference room 2
Khronos “Kodebusters” Party: Tuesday 6:00 PM-8:00 PM – Conference room 2
Khronos Japanese BOF: Wednesday 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM – Conference room 2
COLLADA Toolchain BOF: Wednesday 2:00 PM - 3:45 PM - Conference room 2
COLLADA Demo Party: Wednesday 3:45 PM – 4:45 PM - Conference room 2
OpenGL BOF: Wednesday 5:15 PM – 7:15 PM – Conference room 2
OpenGL Party: Wednesday 7:15 PM – 8:30 PM – Conference room 2

More details at http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/san_diego_siggraph_2007/

About the POP-I Platform
The POP-i platform will enable native applications to access the full power of the OpenKODE media stack architecture which enables 2D graphics, 3D graphics, video and audio to be accelerated and flexibly combined to unlock the full potential of rich media silicon. The use of OpenKODE will encourage and protect the investment of software developers in the POP-i platform by ensuring application portability across multiple handsets – both now and into the future as new handsets are introduced.
About OpenKODE
OpenKODE is a royalty-free, cross-platform standard that combines a set of native APIs into a comprehensive media stack specification for accelerating rich media and graphics applications.  OpenKODE aims to make advanced media capabilities consistently available across multiple devices for increased native source portability and reduced mobile platform fragmentation. OpenKODE 1.0 brings together the OpenGL® ES and OpenVG™ Khronos media APIs to provide state-of-the-art acceleration for vector 2D and 3D graphics and provides the new OpenKODE Core API that abstracts operating system resources to minimize source changes when porting games and applications between Linux, Brew, Symbian, Windows Mobile, WIPI and RTOS-based platforms.  Subsequent versions of OpenKODE will add the OpenSL ES™ and OpenMAX™ media APIs to provide accelerated video and audio that is fully integrated with graphics processing.  More information in OpenKODE can be found at www.khronos.org/openkode/.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenGL®, OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices.  All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at www.khronos.org.

Khronos Group Gains Diverse New Members

A rich variety of companies join Khronos to drive opportunities for accelerated graphics and media in worldwide markets; Standards-based ecosystem strengthened by member companies providing consultancy services around Khronos APIs

7th August, 2007 – SIGGRAPH - San Diego, CA – The Khronos™ Group is delighted to announce that Anark, Antix, ArcSoft, GraphTech, Mentor Graphics, SoftBank Mobile and SRS Labs have joined the existing Khronos membership to help define open standards for the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on platforms ranging from embedded systems such as mobile phones to high-performance desktop and workstation systems.  All Khronos members are able to join any working group to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications and conformance tests - further details are at http://www.khronos.org/members/.  Additionally, member-company Ardites announced a consultancy service offered to any company interested to accelerate the development of products using mobile Khronos APIs.

“At SIGGRAPH 2007, Ardites Ltd announced a software consultancy and service model to support hardware vendors, device manufacturers and application developers to effectively utilize the Khronos APIs. With profound experience in key technologies and mobile multimedia ecosystem challenges, Ardites is capable of reducing the time-to-market, support multiple operating systems and improve the performance and security of the end product. By providing training, designing, integration, implementation and testing services, Ardites complements and strengthens the Khronos ecosystem,” said Jarkko Kemppainen, business and competence unit manager at Ardites.

“Khronos is a forum for industry-leading companies to cooperate and create open standards that drive commercial opportunities for our members and the wider industry, and we welcome our new members that bring expertise and key market insights to help ensure Khronos standards continue to evolve to meet market needs,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. “Our new members include mobile carriers and vendors for 3D authoring tools, mobile middleware and operating systems from all around the world; illustrating how rich-media authoring and acceleration is becoming vital to multiple industries.  Also, an increasing number of member companies such as Ardites and Futuremark are offering consultancy, development and benchmarking services for Khronos APIs – all very vital in encouraging a broad range of products to rapidly and effectively use Khronos open standards.”
“OpenKODE has been developed to provide an essential consistency of service across an increasingly diverse range of mobile and other connected digital devices. We look forward to our highly experienced team at Antix taking an active part in the further development of this important standard,” said Tim Renouf of Antix Labs and the specification editor for OpenKODE.

“We have seen tremendous growth of Multimedia applications on the mobile handset in the past few years. With the introduction of standards like OpenMAX and OpenKODE and their gradual adoption by mobile chip and hardware companies, software companies are liberated to focus energy on product innovation and creativity rather than on lengthy integration with different multimedia hardware,” said David Cao, ArcSoft Vice President of Mobile Business. “The work of the Khronos Group helps to streamline mobile phone development so that different well-segmented software expert companies can work seamlessly together and time-to-market can be significantly reduced. We look forward to seeing an industry-wise adoption of these standards.”

“Khronos is elevating the bar in how standards are defined and created by taking into consideration the entire developer ecosystem,” said Peter Ostrin, CEO, GraphTech Computer Systems.  “They’re enabling innovation through the economic support that comes from being able to deploy new technologies across the widest range of platforms, and we are excited to join the Khronos Group as a Contributing Member.”

“We have been impressed by the Khronos Group’s proven ability to define advanced standards for mobile media acceleration, deliver them quickly to meet emerging market needs – and to prevent fragmentation within its standards to provide a stable programming environment,” said Hiroshi Ohta, executive vice president, product and service development, SoftBank Mobile.  “We have confidence that Khronos will continue to provide the foundation specifications for advanced media acceleration that will enable us to create a thriving developer community for the POP-i platform - and we are pleased to announce that we are joining Khronos to support and encourage its ongoing activities and the OpenKODE standard.”

See Khronos at SIGGRAPH 2007, San Diego; August 7-9 2007
Any members of the press and industry are invited to visit the Khronos Booth #227 to see demonstrations by Khronos Group members and to attend these Khronos events:

SIGGRAPH Course “3D Ecosystem” Tuesday 8:30 AM – 5:00 PM – Conference room 4
Khronos Handheld API BOFs: Tuesday 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM – Conference room 2
Khronos “Kodebusters” Party: Tuesday 6:00 PM-8:00 PM – Conference room 2
Khronos Japanese BOF: Wednesday 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM – Conference room 2
COLLADA Toolchain BOF: Wednesday 2:00 PM - 3:45 PM - Conference room 2
COLLADA Demo Party: Wednesday 3:45 PM – 4:45 PM - Conference room 2
OpenGL BOF: Wednesday 5:15 PM – 7:15 PM – Conference room 2
OpenGL Party: Wednesday 7:15 PM – 8:30 PM – Conference room 2

More details at http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/san_diego_siggraph_2007/

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenGL®, OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices.  All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at http://www.khronos.org.

About ArcSoft
ArcSoft, Inc., founded in 1994 and headquartered in Fremont, California, is an industry leading software developer of multimedia technologies and applications across desktop, embedded, and mobile platforms. ArcSoft offers a full line of high-performance imaging, audio, and video solutions within an extremely small footprint, bringing an exhilarating rich media user experience to mobile phones. ArcSoft mobile multimedia solutions are developed to support the Khronos Group’s OpenMAX standards. For further details, please visit our corporate Web site: www.arcsoft.com

About Ardites
Ardites is a consultancy company focused towards mobile software development. Ardites is a privately owned company, based in Finland and among the fastest growing companies in its industry sector. Ardites was established in 2002 and joined with the Khronos consortium in 2007. Ardites is offering services to all levels of mobile software development, such as IP providers, Operating system providers, OEMs and operators. Ardites’ portfolio, consists of, training, design, implementation and testing services. Web site: www.ardites.com

SOFTBANK MOBILE Adopts OpenKODE

New POP-i platform provides native application access to OpenKODE APIs

22nd May, 2007 - Clearlake, CA - The Khronos™ Group announced today that SOFTBANK MOBILE Corporation has adopted the OpenKODE standard for advanced graphics and media processing in its new Portable Open Platform Initiative (POP-i) platform for mobile phones that was also announced today.  The POP-i platform will enable native applications to access the full power of the OpenKODE media stack architecture which enables 2D graphics, 3D graphics, video and audio to be accelerated and flexibly combined to unlock the full potential of rich media silicon. The use of OpenKODE will encourage and protect the investment of software developers in the POP-i platform by ensuring application portability across multiple handsets - both now and into the future as new handsets are introduced. 

“As the open and royalty-free industry standard API, OpenKODE is expected to drive the growth of active community of application and middleware developers for the common platform under development for mobile phones,” said Hiroshi Ohta, executive vice president & general manager of Product & Service Development, SOFTBANK MOBILE. “Because of its comprehensive scope of multi-media sources, including 2D/3D graphics, audio and video, OpenKODE can help us setting a stage for innovative, rich content offerings that can fit a new era of mobile multimedia.”

“The Khronos Group is delighted that SoftBank Mobile has selected the OpenKODE standard to provide the advanced graphics and media capability in the POP-i platform,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA.  “We expect that many operating systems and handset software platforms will adopt OpenKODE to provide state-of-the-art media and graphics acceleration, significantly reducing industry fragmentation and enabling a new class of native applications to innovatively mix multiple media types to create compelling user experiences.”

About OpenKODE
OpenKODE is a royalty-free, cross-platform standard that combines a set of native APIs into a comprehensive media stack specification for accelerating rich media and graphics applications.  OpenKODE aims to make advanced media capabilities consistently available across multiple devices for increased native source portability and reduced mobile platform fragmentation. OpenKODE 1.0 brings together the OpenGL® ES and OpenVG™ Khronos media APIs to provide state-of-the-art acceleration for vector 2D and 3D graphics and provides the new OpenKODE Core API that abstracts operating system resources to minimize source changes when porting games and applications between Linux, Brew, Symbian, Windows Mobile, WIPI and RTOS-based platforms.  Subsequent versions of OpenKODE will add the OpenSL ES™ and OpenMAX™ media APIs to provide accelerated video and audio that is fully integrated with graphics processing.  More information in OpenKODE can be found at http://www.khronos.org/openkode/.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenGL®, OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices.  All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at http://www.khronos.org/.

Khronos and Web3D Enter Official Cooperation as Mobile & Internet Continue to Converge

Two standardization organizations initiate cooperation to accelerate market adoption of pervasive connected 3D; Initial focus is synergy between X3D and COLLADA.

17th April, 2007 – Web3D Symposium, Perugia, Italy – The Khronos™ Group and the Web3D™ Consortium announced today that they have executed a liaison agreement to enable the flow of draft specifications and feedback between the two organizations.  This liaison will enable cooperative initiatives to align and combine the use of standards from both groups to drive the growth of connected 3D on mobile and embedded devices as well as on the Web.  The initial focus of this liaison is to leverage the existing synergy between the X3D™ and COLLADA™ standards from Web3D and Khronos respectively.  A white paper exploring how these two standards complement each other can be found here: http://www.khronos.org/collada/presentations/Developing_Web_Applications_with_COLLADA_and_X3D.pdf.

COLLADA is an XML-based asset interchange format that enables the use of diverse digital content creation tools to author sophisticated assets for use by 3D applications, including animation, shaders and physics effects.  COLLADA represents authored data in multiple forms, enabling the transformation of assets as they journey from content tools that use high-level descriptions to run-time applications that require optimized, platform-specific representations.  X3D is an XML-based delivery format focused on the visualization of 3D assets and contains the information needed for interactive applications - traditionally on the Web. X3D specifies behaviors and interactions, includes a specific run-time model that enables picking, viewing, navigation, and scripting, and defines an API to manipulate the scene graph at run-time.

“There is already a high degree of synergy between the COLLADA and X3D XML-based standards, and by closely aligning our efforts we can ensure that real-time X3D applications can seamlessly benefit from COLLADA-based authoring environments,” said Alan Hudson, president of the Web3D Consortium and CEO of Yumetech.  “Khronos has also set the foundation for mobile accelerated 3D with OpenGL® ES and Web3D will benefit significantly from having a closer link to that standard that will accelerate compelling X3D applications on a huge diversity of embedded devices.”

“We are on the verge of a revolution in connected, mobile 3D applications and this cooperation opens the opportunity to accelerate this market development by leveraging over a decade of experience in the Web3D community,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA.  “The Web3D Consortium has made significant progress in bringing real-time, connected 3D into the medical imaging, military simulation, geospatial, CAD, and web-based visualization markets.  This liaison has the potential to accelerate the synergistic use of both groups’ standards in these ground-breaking opportunities.”

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenGL®, OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices.  All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  More information is available at http://www.khronos.org.

About the Web3D Consortium
The Web3D Consortium is a non-profit, international standards organization focused on web-based 3D rendering that originally spearheaded the development of the VRML 1.0 and 2.0 specifications. Today, the Web3D Consortium is utilizing its broad-based industry support to continue developing the X3D specification for communicating 3D on the Web between applications and across distributed networks and web services. Through well-coordinated efforts with the ISO, the W3C and the Open GIS Consortium, the Web3D Consortium is maintaining and extending its standardization activities. Visit the Web3D Consortium at http://www.web3d.org.

Khronos, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenMAX and OpenSL ES are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc.  Web3D and X3D are trademarks of the Web3D Consortium.  COLLADA is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. used by permission by Khronos.  OpenGL and OpenML are registered trademarks and the OpenGL ES logo is a trademark of Silicon Graphics Inc. used by permission by Khronos.  All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

glFX and Composition Working Groups

Open call for participation to define visual effects framework and window system APIs for advanced user interfaces and window systems

7th March, 2007 - GDC, San Francisco, CA - The Khronos™ Group announced today it is issuing calls for participation in two newly formed new working groups. The glFX™ Working Group is defining a run-time API to enable advanced 3D visual effects contained in a COLLADA™ FX file to be easily and portably used in OpenGL® and OpenGL ES applications. The Composition Working Group is defining graphics APIs to enable window systems to be constructed using open standards for display composition to encourage mobile devices to use fully accelerated advanced user interfaces. Additionally, Khronos is delighted to announce that Ardites, AZTEQ mobile, DaimlerChrysler, Coding Technologies, Marvell, Matrox, McubeWorks, Micron, NDS, NXP, Omegame, PineOne Communications, Tungsten and Vodafone have joined over one hundred existing members to define open standards for the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on platforms ranging from embedded systems such as mobile phones to high-performance desktop and workstation systems. All Khronos members are able to join any working group to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications - further details are at www.khronos.org/members.

Today Khronos also announced a COLLADA contest to encourage open source COLLADA conditioning programs to be created and uploaded into the COLLADA Framework on Sourceforge. A growing body of conditioners enables any developer to construct sophisticated pipelines to condition content for diverse platforms. Winners of the COLLADA Contest will be announced at SIGGRAPH 2007 and prizes include airfare to San Diego and four night’s accommodation to attend SIGGRAPH and a SONY Playstation 3. Further details are at www.ColladaContest.com.

The Collada Contest marks the beginning of a number of Khronos online community initiatives to enable and foster worldwide adoption of Khronos standards, including the availability of a Japanese Khronos site at www.khronos.jp Khronos will run regular contests and competitions driven by Khronos working groups including an upcoming OpenKODE Contest. 

“We welcome all our new members as their expertise and market presence helps to continue evolve Khronos to genuinely meet industry needs. This evolution is perfectly illustrated by the new Composition and glFX Working Groups which are addressing two of the hottest areas in mobile graphics - advanced user interfaces and new generation programmable 3D graphics,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. “The glFX Working Group also shows the benefit of a broad membership as it combines expertise from the OpenGL, OpenGL ES and COLLADA communities for the benefit of all. A standardized effects framework for OpenGL and OpenGL ES is a welcome development and NVIDIA is pleased to make its CgFX run-time API available as a design input to the Working Group to minimize fragmentation and accelerate timescales.”

“AZTEQ mobile is pleased to join Khronos to help accelerate the development and adoption of OpenKODE in the wireless industry. AZTEQ is focused on enabling compelling 3D content on mobile devices and bringing a rich gaming experience to end users,” said Quaeed Motiwala, vice president of marketing at AZTEQ mobile. “OpenKODE aims to reduce the porting costs of application software and promote content reuse, making the efforts of Khronos and AZTEQ synergistic. We are delighted to be part of the industry-leading Khronos ecosystem.”

“Joining the Khronos Group is a key step in the development of Omegame,” said Sébastien Kohn, sales and marketing director for Omegame. “Participating in the definition of the new standards that will rule tomorrow’s digital life will strengthen the technological advance of Menus Master, Omegame’s complete user interface (UI) authoring toolchain. Moreover, Omegame is also very proud of being the first French company to join the Khronos Group.”

About the glFX Working Group
An effects framework is critical in the age of programmable graphics as an essential link between DCC tools that create visual effects and applications that need to apply these effects to models and scenes.  The glFX specification will create an open standard runtime API for OpenGL and OpenGL ES applications to manipulate and use effects described in the existing COLLADA FX format.  The glFX Working Group will also provide documentation, example and utility code, and other infrastructure to enable a complete workflow from content creation through to application rendering.

About the Composition Working Group
The new Composition Working Group is defining APIs to enable window systems to be constructed using open standards for display composition potentially using techniques such as multi-tasking, 2D and 3D transitions and alpha-blending based composition.  These APIs will enable hardware accelerated display composition using a subset of existing OpenGL ES and OpenVG functionality.  The working group will not define application level APIs but will ensure that windowed applications will be enable to efficiently use OpenKODE™ for accessing media acceleration and interacting with the window system.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenGL®, OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More Information at www.khronos.org.

OpenGL ES 2.0

Royalty-free specification to enable new generation programmable mobile graphics; Complements widespread OpenGL ES 1.1 standard for fixed function graphics

5th March, 2007 - GDC, San Francisco, CA - The Khronos™ Group announced today that it has unanimously ratified and publicly released the finalized OpenGL® ES 2.0 specification for programmable 3D graphics that will significantly boost the functionality, flexibility and visual realism offered by a wide range of embedded and mobile devices. OpenGL ES 2.0 complements the widely deployed OpenGL ES 1.1 standard for fixed function graphics by defining the OpenGL ES Shading Language for programming vertex and fragment shaders and integrating it with a streamlined OpenGL ES 1.1-derived API. OpenGL ES 2.0 was previously released as a provisional specification to enable silicon vendors to initiate early silicon designs and for Khronos to fine-tune the specification as the industry gained silicon implementation experience of mobile programmable graphics. Multiple OpenGL ES 2.0 silicon devices are expected to commence shipment before the end of 2007. The OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 specifications are available for free download at www.khronos.org/opengles/.

In order to minimize cost and power requirements of programmable graphics subsystems, OpenGL ES 2.0 eliminates from OpenGL ES 1.1 any fixed functionality that can be replaced by shader programs. For complete backwards compatibility, OpenGL ES 2.0 capable devices will typically ship with two drivers: OpenGL ES 2.0 drivers for visually advanced applications and OpenGL ES 1.1 drivers to support the growing number of native 3D applications coded to this widely adopted standard.

“The OpenGL ES Working Group has carefully balanced the introduction of cutting-edge programmable graphics capability with the commercial needs of the industry that has embraced OpenGL ES 1.1. OpenGL ES 2.0 hardware accelerators will provide the ultimate in graphics realism for the next generation of high-end mobile devices, while offering backward compatibility and a performance boost for older content via ES 1.1 drivers,” said Tom Olson, chairman of the OpenGL ES working group and a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Texas Instruments, Inc. “TI is excited to support OpenGL ES 2.0 with our OMAP™ 3 platform to bring programmable graphics technology to the handset, raise the bar for mobile graphics experiences, and pave the way for ever more compelling consumer entertainment.”

Khronos expects to release conformance tests for OpenGL ES 2.0 within six months, enabling interested companies to gain access to source code to test their implementations and use the OpenGL ES trademark on products that pass the defined testing criteria, ensuring that conformant OpenGL ES implementations provide a reliable, cross-platform graphics programming platform.

“OpenGL ES 2.0 leveraged the proven architectural foundation of desktop OpenGL 2.0 to create a coherent family of 3D APIs architected to meet the needs of diverse markets. With the recent merging of Khronos and the OpenGL ARB we are just at the beginning of a blossoming of synergistic innovation between the desktop and embedded working groups,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA has shipped multiple successful devices using OpenGL ES 1.1 and we are fully committed to integrating OpenGL ES 2.0 into upcoming GoForce mobile GPUs and application processors.”

“Futuremark is committed to delivering world leading performance measurement tools and services for all relevant APIs and platforms in mobile industry. Now we’re harnessing that expertise, rolling out the world’s premier 3D performance benchmark for the OpenGL ES 2.0 API at the same time that Khronos is publishing the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification itself,” said Petri Talala, vice president of Futuremark’s mobile business unit. “Every top mobile device vendor is currently implementing OpenGL ES 2.0 in their next generation product lines, proving the immediate need for 3DMarkMobile ES 2.0 benchmarking product. The benchmark was highly anticipated and even today it is providing meaningful performance data for many Khronos members working on next generation mobile device 3D hardware.”

“OpenGL ES 2.0 will be a significant enabler of advanced graphics applications for future generations of mobile devices. Imagination Technologies is pleased to announce that it is showing initial OpenGL ES 2.0 silicon based on its PowerVR SGX IP at GDC 2007 and also releasing its PowerVR Insider OpenGL ES 2.0 SDK to developers at the show.”

About OpenGL ES
OpenGL ES is a royalty-free, cross-platform API for full-function 2D and 3D graphics on embedded systems - including gaming consoles, mobile 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 accelerator silicon. OpenGL ES 1.1 defines a fixed function 3D graphics pipeline which is widely adopted across multiple industries. OpenGL ES 2.0 complements OpenGL ES 1.1 by enabling fully programmable 3D graphics in a wide range of high-performance and small footprint devices.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenGL®, OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More Information at www.khronos.org.

OpenVG Conformance Tests

OpenVG gaining strong industry momentum as unique acceleration API for Bezier vector graphics; OpenVG 1.0 Conformance Tests and Sample Source immediately available

5th March, 2007 - GDC, San Francisco, CA - The Khronos™ Group announced today it has released the official OpenVG™ 1.0 Conformance Tests that can be used by vendors to certify that the rapidly increasing number of OpenVG implementations are compliant with the OpenVG specification. Products that meet the requirements of the conformance tests may use the OpenVG trademark to encourage reliable, cross-platform vector graphics interoperability. Additionally, Khronos announced today that it has placed its Sample implementation of OpenVG 1.0 into open source under an MIT license to further enable OpenVG implementers and developers to leverage this innovative, royalty-free open standard in their products and applications. The OpenVG 1.0 specification and Sample source are free for download at http://www.khronos.org/openvg/ and details of the OpenVG Conformance Tests can be found at http://www.khronos.org/adopters.

“The OpenVG Working Group is dedicated to expanding the OpenVG ecosystem and is today launching a comprehensive set of conformance tests and placing its sample implementation into open source,” said Andrzej Mamona, chairman of the OpenVG working group and design architect, AMD (NYSE: AMD). “AMD has a strong roadmap of dedicated hardware to accelerate scalable vector graphics and Flash®-like rendering with its handheld graphics processors and is working closely with handset manufacturers to bring these technologies to consumers.”

The OpenVG Conformance Test suite was developed by the OpenVG Working Group with HUONE in Korea acting as technical lead. The tests are available to any Promoter, Contributor or Adopter Member of Khronos for a fee of $10K which enables an unlimited number of OpenVG products to be certified as conformant to the specification and to use the OpenVG logo. Khronos provides full access to the test source for porting by implementers who upload the automatically generated test results to the Khronos web-site for peer review for 30 days before certification is awarded. The OpenVG Sample implementation is a software implementation of the specification that runs on a PC platform and has been used by the OpenVG working group to test and refine the specification. Although not tuned for performance, this open source implementation provides deep insights into the functionality of the OpenVG API.

“NVIDIA has been the implementer of the OpenVG Sample implementation and now we are pleased to place that work into open source to encourage the further adoption of the OpenVG standard,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA is fully committed to support OpenVG on our range of GoForce application processors and mobile GPUs. We expect this innovative API to provide an order of magnitude more performance for vector-based players such as Flash and SVG compared to using OpenGL ES acceleration - at significantly less power and cost.”

“We are seeing a significant number of handset manufacturers implementing the OpenVG 1.0 API in next generation hardware, providing their future customers with compelling new interfaces, applications and functionality. To help these industry pioneers produce optimally performing products, we are pleased to see OpenVG conformance tests and Sample implementation as a source code format available immediately,” said Petri Talala, Futuremark’s vice president of mobile business. “Futuremark is committed to delivering world leading performance measurement tools for all relevant APIs and platforms including OpenVG 1.0. The combination of OpenVG Sample implementation, conformance tests and our benchmark VGMark 1.0 will help the industry build better performing OpenVG-enabled devices will lead to broader use of vector graphics applications by consumers around the world.”

“Support for OpenVG is key to effective acceleration of a wide range of vector graphics applications such as SVG players, Flash(TM) content, scalable User Interfaces and navigation,” said Tony King-Smith, vice president marketing, Imagination Technologies. “Imagination Technologies is committed to supporting OpenVG across its full range of MBX and SGX cores, and is shipping OpenVG drivers for its PowerVR MBX graphics cores today. We will be demonstrating a range of OpenVG accelerated applications at GDC 2007.”

“With our in-depth knowledge, gained through years of working in partnership with the silicon chip manufacturers, settop box (STB) vendors, as well as our own middleware and application authoring, NDS is in a unique position to help formulate and introduce new standards of performance to the TV viewing experience,” said James Field, director of technology, TV Platforms, NDS Group plc. “In becoming a member of the Khronos Group, we aim to share our expertise in the STB market and ensure that the OpenVG standard meet the demands of the next generation digital television experience in a way that is compatible with equipment manufacturers’ resources.”

About OpenVG
OpenVG defines low-level 2D operations based on Bezier curves to provide the industry’s only hardware acceleration layer for vector graphics - enabling graphics silicon to accelerate packages such as SVG and Flash for the first time. Vector graphics provide smooth and fluidly scalable 2D to create high-quality user interfaces, new-generation mapping and GPS displays, compelling games and ultra-readable text on small displays. OpenVG enables high-quality, interactive vector graphics at high extremely quality and very low power levels - ideal for small screen, battery-powered devices. OpenVG 1.0 is included in Khronos’ new OpenKODE specification that combines a set of native APIs into a comprehensive media stack specification for accelerating rich media and graphics applications.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenGL®, OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More Information at www.khronos.org.

 

Khronos Releases OpenKODE 1.0 Specification for Mobile Rich Media Applications

Multiple Khronos members showing OpenKODE at 3GSM; Standardizes media stack functionality and dramatically reduces application source fragmentation; Provisional specification encourages developer feedback while maximizing implementation momentum

12th February, 2007 - 3GSM, Barcelona - The Khronos™ Group announced today that it has publicly released a provisional version of the OpenKODE™ 1.0 specification, on schedule, to enable widespread developer feedback and rapid industry implementation of this important new standard that is designed to bring portability and advanced media acceleration to mobile handsets. The conformance tests for OpenKODE 1.0 are expected to be publicly released during the second quarter of 2007 to enable conformant implementations to use the OpenKODE trademark. Numerous Khronos members are demonstrating provisional OpenKODE implementations at 3GSM and the OpenKODE 1.0 specification is expected to be finalized by mid-2007 after integration of industry feedback. The OpenKODE 1.0 provisional specification is free for download at http://www.khronos.org/openkode/ and may be used royalty-free by implementers and developers. Feedback and comments from the mobile and embedded industries are encouraged on the Khronos OpenKODE technical message boards at http://www.khronos.org/message_boards/.

“As the work of the Khronos organization has progressed, it’s been clear there is a real hunger for rich multimedia applications on a wide range of embedded devices,” says analyst Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research. “However, the industry has desperately needed a unifying architecture for the APIs that will enable this content to be delivered efficiently and across all platforms and operating systems. OpenKODE has the potential to move the mobile industry forward with giant steps in much the same way that DirectX enabled a generation of dynamic multimedia entertainment including 3D games, music, movies, and video on PCs.”

OpenKODE is a royalty-free, cross-platform standard that combines a set of native APIs into a comprehensive media stack specification for accelerating rich media and graphics applications. OpenKODE aims to make advanced media capabilities consistently available across multiple devices for increased native source portability and reduced mobile platform fragmentation. OpenKODE 1.0 brings together the OpenGL® ES and OpenVG™ Khronos media APIs to provide state-of-the-art acceleration for vector 2D and 3D graphics and provides the new OpenKODE Core API that abstracts operating system resources to minimize source changes when porting games and applications between Linux, Brew, Symbian, Windows Mobile, WIPI and RTOS-based platforms. Subsequent versions of OpenKODE will add the OpenSL ES™ and OpenMAX™ media APIs to provide accelerated video and audio that is fully integrated with graphics processing.

The OpenKODE conformance test suite is being developed by Futuremark under contract to Khronos will enable mobile device chip makers, handset manufacturers and middleware vendors to confirm that their platforms conform to the OpenKODE 1.0 media stack specification and will include trans-API conformance tests to ensure that OpenKODE implementations support rich mixing of media types such as real-time video being processed in a 3D application. The suite of conformance testing tools will be made available through the Khronos Group OpenKODE Adopters program and products that pass all the tests may use the OpenKODE trademark.

“The objective of the OpenKODE 1.0 specification is to enable the small device industry to embed standardized functionality into the core of their products, in such a way that they could still look and feel unique, and yet run software not geared specifically for those devices in such a way that only minimal or no changes are necessary. Imagine for a moment a new market segment for portable games, marketed just like PSP discs or perhaps downloaded through a centralized service, but which can run on any of multiple brands,” said Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews.

“The OpenKODE working group has generated a public specification in just 12 months with strong industry support - reflecting the urgent industry need that is addressed by this significant new standard,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, chairman of the OpenKODE working group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA is using the OpenKODE architecture to deliver the full mixed media capability of our GoForce handheld GPUs to mobile developers and we are thrilled to demonstrate our provisional OpenKODE implementation at 3GSM alongside the release of the specification.”

“OpenKODE is a long awaited solution to seriously fight platform defragmentation and bring true media acceleration interoperability for mobile platforms. Acrodea is committed to continue driving the OpenKODE initiative forward and will be helping its customers & partners to steer towards a uniform platform strategy. Acrodea plans to start providing its close partners with an implementation of the OpenKODE Core in the first half of 2007,” said Yoshio Kuniyoshi CTO of Acrodea Inc.

“Demand for rich handheld multimedia is increasing exponentially and OpenKODE simplifies the development of multimedia solutions by providing an open API layer that unifies a wide range of media technologies in mobile devices” said Ryu Koriyama, Aplix CEO and CTO. “Aplix has been a contributor and strong supporter of the OpenKODE project. Aplix is currently working closely with Japanese operators on the adoption of OpenKODE. We also plan to integrate OpenKODE support into our mobile Linux & Java middleware solutions including our industry-leading JBlend product that’s currently deployed in more than 267 million handsets.”

“OpenKODE is a significant advance for the handheld industry as it combines the Khronos industry-leading media APIs into a reliable set of functionality that can provide great native performance on mobile devices while reducing fragmentation from the software developers’ point of view,” said Tero Sarkkinen, Futuremark’s executive vice president of sales and marketing. “Futuremark is delighted to play a key role in the industry roll-out of OpenKODE and to apply our considerable expertise in performance measurement software development and functionality testing to create the OpenKODE conformance tests.”

“OpenKODE is an excellent solution for developers who are targeting the embedded systems world. It was built with great consideration for developers and the development process. From its first version, OpenKODE includes a designated profiling API. This API is already integrated into gDEBugger ES, an OpenGL ES Debugger and Profiler, to enable developers optimize the performance of rich graphics applications. We will continue to work as part of the OpenKODE working group to make sure that developers will be able to get the most out of their target embedded devices,” said Avi Shapira, CEO of Graphic Remedy.

“OpenKODE plays a significant role in the industry as mobile devices become richer in specifications and users expecting more variational services. We at HI are thrilled to be involved in the specification making process and to make our products support this standard,” said Hirotaka Suzuki, CTO of HI CORPORATION.

“Battling over the past 6 years to deliver rich 3D gaming across every conceivable combination of operating system and mobile platform known to man, Ideaworks3D understands intimately the imperative to harmonize mobile media APIs for the benefit of all participants in the mobile ecosystem,” said Alex Caccia CEO of Ideaworks3D. “At 3GSM, we are delighted to debut our provisional OpenKODE Core implementation, which will form the foundation of Airplay 3.0, Ideaworks3D’s next generation solution for the development and rapid cross-platform deployment of native mobile applications.”

“Reducing fragmentation to enable lower cost creation and deployment of native content is the key to unlocking the revenue potential of the new generation of mobile devices,” said Tim Renouf, OpenKODE specification editor and systems architect at Tao Group. “We at Tao believe that OpenKODE will play a major role in this, and are excited to be involved in the specification process and to be showing our OpenKODE solution as part of intent GamePlayer, Tao’s cross-platform binary-portable native solution for mobile gaming, at 3GSM and GDC.”

“TI has been actively involved in the development and support of open standards since they are driving the next wave of exhilarating games and applications. The release of the OpenKODE 1.0 specification will foster creativity in the mobile environment with a widely available native API platform to accelerate game development,” said Avner Goren, marketing director of Texas Instruments Cellular Systems Solutions. “TI is pleased to work with Ideaworks3D to support OpenKODE on our OMAP and OMAP-Vox platforms to reduce the time and cost of bringing mobile games to market across a broad range of handsets.”

“OpenKODE is another example of Khronos quickly and effectively responding to the needs of a very rapidly evolving market. This new API not only unifies the existing APIs thereby providing more clarity for trans-API applications, but also unlocks the performance and flexibility of the platforms of today and tomorrow by offering a common way of accessing the native environment,” said Ed Plowman, product marketing manager, Graphics Business Unit, ARM®. “As a founding member of the Khronos board of Promoters, ARM is excited by the new opportunities OpenKODE presents for ARM itself and its partners in the deployment of ARM’s wide range of technologies”

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenGL®, OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Releases New OpenMAX IL 1.1 Standard for Enhanced Streaming Media Portability

Expanded functionality retains backwards compatibility with OpenMAX IL 1.0; OpenMAX IL 1.1 Conformance Tests immediately available

12th February, 2007 - 3GSM, Barcelona - The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that it has ratified and publicly released the royalty-free OpenMAX™ IL 1.1 specification. OpenMAX IL 1.1 defines enhanced media component interfaces to enable the rapid integration of media acceleration into streaming media frameworks on embedded devices. Today, Khronos has also launched the OpenMAX IL 1.1 Adopter’s Program that provides access to a new set of conformance tests. Products that meet the requirements of the conformance tests may use the OpenMAX IL trademark which insures customers of reliable, cross-platform audio, video, and image codec interoperability. OpenMAX IL has been developed through the successful Khronos Working Group process, with Work Group Chair leadership provided by Texas Instruments and the support of many Khronos member companies including AMD, Beatnik, Broadcom, Motorola, Nokia, NVIDIA, NXP, SKY MobileMedia and STMicroelectronics. The OpenMAX IL 1.1 specification is free for download at http://www.khronos.org/openmax/ and details of the OpenMAX Adopter’s Program can be found at http://www.khronos.org/adopters.

“The OpenMAX standard is ambitious in its goal to offer a set of APIs for the embedded device market to enable hardware acceleration of multimedia codecs,” notes analyst Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research. “The introduction of OpenMAX IL goes another step with a low level interface that abstracts codecs and provides portability across operating systems and software stacks. OpenMAX IL demonstrates the flexibility of the Khronos model in general, and specifically; the ability of OpenMAX to adapt to the changing demands of developers and manufacturers in the embedded device market.”

OpenMAX IL 1.1 adds significant functionality to OpenMAX 1.0, which was released in January 2006, including:
- Standardized components, interfaces and controls for common media functionality to make most streaming applications easier to construct and more portable;
- Enhanced video encode and decode controls for more record and playback flexibility;
- Enhanced camera controls including sophisticated focus control, continuous and single shot control and auto exposure control;
- Abstracted access to synchronous content enabling flexible media components with the ability to process content from a variety of sources;
- Extended buffer payload information such as video quantization data to enable sophisticated adaptive applications;
- Extended color format support;
- Creation and parsing of metadata in the media stream to enable intelligent media components and applications;
- Enhanced resource management for more robust operation on constrained systems;
- Integration with EGL to enable OpenMAX to seamlessly integrate with graphic APIs such as OpenGL® ES and OpenVG™.

“TI remains fully committed to the definition and deployment of open standards-based APIs, including the adoption of OpenMAX for our OMAP platform and OMAP-Vox family of products,” said Avner Goren, TI’s strategic marketing director for Cellular Systems Solutions in its Wireless Terminals Business Unit.  “TI welcomes and supports IL 1.1 from the OpenMAX group and believes the updated features, functionality and portability of IL 1.1 will fully address the needs of more quickly deploying multimedia solutions in wireless handsets.”

“As one of the original founding members of the Khronos Group, AMD strongly believes in open standards as an enabler to the growth of the industry. AMD is looking forward to deploying OpenMAX interfaces on its Imageon media processors in the near future to drive the next-generation of rich media enabled handheld devices,” said Andrej Zdravkovic, senior director for software development at AMD.

“Beatnik is committed to continuing our contribution to the OpenMAX effort and we are already supplying OpenMAX IL compliant implementations of our industry standard mobileBAE software audio engine to mobile handset and platform providers,” said Jeremy Copp, Beatnik’s chief sales officer.  “By delivering technology that fully meets the demands of the OpenMAX IL framework we are enabling handset manufacturers to reduce integration time as they bring to market products incorporating advanced audio capabilities and services across a range of hardware, software and operating system platforms.”

“The standardization of graphics and codecs interfaces will increase the speed of adoption of rich multimedia capabilities in a range of portable devices,” said Dr. Robert Swann, Senior Director of Marketing for Broadcom’s Mobile Multimedia business unit. “We welcome the work that Khronos has completed to date and are pleased to be a contributing member, supporting the development of OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenMAX IL.”

“The introduction of standard component classes in OpenMAX IL 1.1.clearly paves the way for a platform-independent component-based design methodology for media-rich devices. We are very excited by the opportunity to support this standard in our development tools, enabling IDMs and OEMs to rapidly construct complex media graphs from a basket of compliant components,” said Dave Murray, CEO, Incoras Solutions Ltd.

“OpenMAX is continuing to evolve to meet industry needs with significant industry support from silicon and software vendors and OEMs,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA is fully committed to deploying OpenMAX on its range of handheld GPUs and to tightly integrate OpenMAX with the other Khronos APIs as part of the emerging OpenKODE™ standard - enabling rich, mixed media applications that make use of OpenMAX’s state-of-the-art video and audio processing.”

“STMicroelectronics is pleased to contribute to the OpenMAX IL API as a standard to control multimedia components in mobile devices,” said Alessandro Cremonesi, group vice president, strategy and system technology and advanced system technology general manager, STMicroelectronics. “The first open source implementation of the OpenMAX IL 1.0 specification, known as ‘Bellagio’, was released by ST in March 2006 and is being improved to support new IL 1.1 features.”

About OpenMAX
OpenMAX IL is one of three layers of the overall OpenMAX standard 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 IL (Integration Layer) API defines a standardized media component interface to enable developers and platform providers to integrate and communicate with multimedia codecs implemented in hardware or software.  OpenMAX DL (Development Layer) APIs enables codec developers to accelerate the creation and portability of codecs with a standardized set of primitive functionality across a range of computing platforms. OpenMAX DL 1.0 was released in the first quarter of 2006. The OpenMAX AL (Application Layer) is an application-level API that - provides common high-level streaming application functionality to enable streaming media applications to be portable across multiple operating systems and hardware platforms. OpenMAX AL 1.0 is expected to be released during the first half of 2007.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenGL®, OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Invites Public Review of OpenKODE 1.0 Specification Draft

OpenKODE 1.0 Public Release Expected in First Quarter of 2007; Futuremark Selected by Khronos to Create OpenKODE 1.0 Conformance Tests

12th December, 2006 - Clearlake, CA - The Khronos™ Group today announced that a draft of the OpenKODE™ standard is available, on schedule, for public review by selected applicants. Khronos invites any interested party to execute a Khronos Reviewer’s Agreement and provide feedback and guidance to the OpenKODE Working Group to ensure that this important standard meet the needs of the industry. Additionally, Khronos today announced that it has selected Futuremark® Corporation to create the OpenKODE Conformance Test Suite that will help ensure that OpenKODE provides a highly reliable set of cross-platform media APIs that mobile application developers can trust on any platform. OpenKODE 1.0 is expected to be publicly released in the first quarter of 2007. More details about OpenKODE and the Reviewer’s Agreement are available at http://www.khronos.org/openkode/.

OpenKODE is a royalty-free, cross-platform standard that combines a set of native APIs into a comprehensive media stack specification for accelerating rich media and graphics applications. OpenKODE aims to make advanced media capabilities consistently available across multiple devices for increased native source portability and reduced mobile platform fragmentation. OpenKODE 1.0 brings together the OpenGL® ES and , Open VG™, OpenSL and OpenMAX Khronos media APIs to provide state-of-the-art acceleration for vector 2D and , 3D, graphicsvideo and audio and provides the new OpenKODE Core API that abstracts operating system resources to minimize source changes when porting games and applications between Linux, Brew, Symbian, , Windows Mobile, WIPI and RTOS-based platforms. Subsequent versions of OpenKODE will add the OpenSL ES™ and OpenMAX™ media APIs to provide accelerated video and audio that is fully integrated with graphics processing.

“The OpenKODE project is on schedule and is on target for completion just 12 months from initiation. The OpenKODE working group has enjoyed strong industry support and has completed a draft of the specification ready for the public review that is a vital part of the Khronos standardization process to ensure our standards are grounded in real-world requirements,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. “Khronos is also delighted to be working with Futuremark to create the OpenKODE Conformance Test Suite, ensuring that this vital piece of the OpenKODE ecosystem will leverage their extensive testing expertise.”

The OpenKODE conformance test suite is being developed by Futuremark under contract to Khronos will enable mobile device chip makers, handset manufacturers and middleware vendors to confirm that their platforms conform to the OpenKODE 1.0 media stack specification and will include trans-API conformance tests to ensure that OpenKODE implementations support rich mixing of media types such as real-time video being processed in a 3D application. The suite of conformance testing tools will be made available through the Khronos Group OpenKODE Adopters program and products that pass all the tests may use the OpenKODE trademark. Independently, Futuremark will complement the conformance test suites with a set of tools designed to provide performance metrics for state-of-the-art rich media OpenKODE applications.

“OpenKODE will be a significant advance for the handheld industry as it combines the Khronos industry-leading media APIs into a reliable set of functionality that can provide great native performance on mobile devices while reducing fragmentation from the software developers’ point of view,” said Tero Sarkkinen, Futuremark’s executive vice president of sales and marketing. “Futuremark is delighted to play a key role in the industry roll-out of OpenKODE by applying our considerable expertise in performance measurement software development and functionality testing to create the OpenKODE conformance tests.”

About Futuremark Corporation
Futuremark Corporation is the leading provider of performance analysis software and services for PCs and smartphones. Futuremark is known around the world for its benchmark products, including the 3DMark® and PCMark® Series, SPMark™ and VGMark™ (with more than 30 million copies distributed worldwide) and value-added services powered by a database of over 13 million real life benchmarking results. Futuremark® maintains offices in Saratoga, California and Helsinki, Finland. For more information, please visit http://www.futuremark.com.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to www.khronos.org for more information.

OpenGL 2.1 Specification Publicly Released

Increases power and flexibility of OpenGL’s programmable graphics pipeline;  Growing range of OpenGL development tools available;  gDEBugger Academic Program with Graphic Remedy provides free OpenGL debug tools to all academic users

2nd Wednesday, 2006 - SIGGRAPH, Boston, Massachusetts - The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that the OpenGL® 2.1 Specification has been approved by the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) and publicly released today. Originally introduced in 1992, OpenGL is the industry’s most widely used and supported cross-platform 3D and 2D graphics API.  OpenGL 2.1 adds backwards compatible enhancements to OpenGL’s advanced programmable pipeline including: Pixel Buffer Objects for fast texture and pixel copies between frame buffer and buffer objects in GPU memory; texture images specified in standard sRGB color space for enhanced application color management flexibility; and numerous additions to increase the flexibility of shader programming including non-square matrix support, support for arrays as first-class objects, a fragment position query in shaders using Point Sprites and an invariant attribute for variables to enhance shader code reliability.  The OpenGL 2.1 specification may be downloaded at http://www.opengl.org/documentation/specs/.

OpenGL 2.1 maintains OpenGL’s consistent backwards compatibility to ensure that any application that has been coded to use any previous version of OpenGL will continue to run on an OpenGL 2.1 implementation.  The OpenGL ARB is also developing an OpenGL 2.1 SDK complete with reference documentation, sample code, tutorials, tools and utilities for release in 2006.

Following the transition of control of the OpenGL standard to the Khronos Group that was announced yesterday, Khronos will also ratify the OpenGL 2.1 specification and continue to drive the evolution of OpenGL and the ecosystem of OpenGL tools and developers, including continued support for www.opengl.org - with enhanced industry participation and strong synergy with other Khronos standards.

Graphic Remedy Academic Program
Through a program sponsored by the OpenGL ARB, Graphic Remedy will offer a free one year license to its gDEBugger tool.  The Graphic Remedy Academic program will run for one year, during which time any OpenGL developer who is able to confirm they are in academia will receive an Academic gDEBugger License from Graphic Remedy at no cost. This license will be valid for one year and will include all gDEBugger software updates as they became available.  Academic licensees may also optionally decide to purchase a support contract for the software at the reduced rates of $45 or $950 for an Academic institute for the whole year.  For more Information please go to http://academic.gremedy.com. 

gDEBugger is a powerful OpenGL and OpenGL ES debugger and profiler to deliver one of the most intuitive OpenGL development toolkits available for graphics application developers. gDEBugger saves developer’s precious debugging time and boosts application performance by tracing application activity on top of OpenGL to provide the needed information to find bugs and to optimize application rendering performance – for more information visit www.gremedy.com

Khronos at SIGGRAPH 2006, Boston, August 2nd to August 4th 2006
Members of the press and industry are invited to visit the Khronos Booth #611 to see demonstrations by Khronos Group members and to attend any Khronos-sponsored events: 

• Tech Talk: OpenGL ES, OpenVG & OpenKODE - Wednesday 2nd August 10AM-3:30PM, Room 206A
• OpenGL BOF - Wednesday 2nd August 4-6PM Room 206A
• COLLADA BOF & Social Event - Wednesday 2nd August 6-8PM Room 206A
• OpenGL ES BOF - Thursday 3rd August 10AM-12PM Room 251
• Tech Talk: COLLADA - Thursday 3rd August 12-2PM Room 251
• More details at http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/siggraph_2006

About OpenGL
The OpenGL graphics system specification allows developers to incorporate a broad set of rendering, texture mapping, special effects and other powerful visualization functions and provides a graphics pipeline that allows unfettered access to graphics hardware acceleration. Since its introduction by SGI in 1992, the OpenGL standard has become the industry’s most widely used and supported 3D and 2D graphics API. The OpenGL API is supported on all major computer platforms, including AIX®, HP-UX®, IRIX®, Linux®, Mac® OS X, Microsoft® Windows® 2000 and Windows® XP and Solaris™. With broad industry support, the OpenGL API is the vendor-neutral, graphics standard that enables 3D graphics on multiple platforms ranging from cell-phones to supercomputers. OpenGL’s It’s consistent backwards compatibility has created a stable foundation for sophisticated graphics on a wide variety of operating systems for over 10 years. The OpenGL specification is constantly evolving state-of-the-art functionality to efficiently support a wide array of applications from consumer games to professional design applications.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. . Please go to www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Group Standards Support Hundreds of Developer 3D content creation tools, applications and middleware

OpenGL, OpenGL ES and COLLADA enable 1000’s of new games, applications and devices

1st August 2006– SIGGRAPH, Boston, Massachusetts– The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that technologies such as COLLADA, OpenGL and OpenGL ES enable exciting new games, graphical applications and devices that are becoming an integral part of consumers’ everyday life.

Khronos is an open consortium committed to developing royalty-free standards for mobile and embedded markets, including the new OpenKODE initiative to create a coherent development and deployment platform to enable portable, high-performance games and media applications for mobile handsets. Khronos has extensive membership from all aspects of the mobile industry including carriers, handset OEMs, middleware vendors, games developers and CPU and graphics silicon providers.  Further details about joining Khronos for any interested company may be found at: http://www.khronos.org/members/.

“The fact of the matter is: standards are merely an academic exercise until somebody actually uses them,” said Kathleen Maher, senior editor of Tech Watch, published by Jon Peddie Research.  “Khronos brings together the key components for graphics, games, and multimedia; and enables developers to put them together in a way that provides hardware acceleration as well as portability and collaboration.  The end result:  products are now being shipped, running on Khronos APIs.”

“Advanced media applications drive enhanced revenue by raising the value of professional workstations, personal computers, laptops and handsets; enabling higher games revenue, driving network data service usage, and increased sales of hardware, Said Neil Trevett VP NVIDA, President of the Khronos Group and Chairman of the OpenKODE Workgroup. “The work being done every day in the Khronos group reduces disruptive platform variability, enabling software developers to create many different variants of each application, lowering costs, and increasing the widespread availability of advanced content.

As part of its commitment to the Development community, Khronos is offering a number of technical and networking session at Siggraph. Interested developers are invited to come by the Khronos Booth #611 at SIGGRAPH conference to see dozens of demos of the latest developer tools and royalty free standards developed by the Khronos Group.”  ADD SIG INFO HERE

OPENGL ES TOOLS

Futuremark?
Hybrid?
HI Caorp?

This is great - and we already have something in place for this and have just been waiting for content from members - http://www.khronos.org/consumers/submit

Great OpenGL ES demo:
http://www.futuremark.com/companyinfo/pressroom/productpictures/dmpmikage/
http://www.futuremark.com/companyinfo/pressroom/pressreleases/49357/

(tools?) “DMP’s active involvement in the Open GL ES development is the key ingredient in driving the open standard API adaptation into the embedded industry, especially in Japan. Said Neil Trevett, President of the Khronos group. “We are proud DMP has developed PICA graphics IP which has proven the innovative Open GL ES implementation can enable seamless extension of the acceleration and expands the horizon of Open GL ES further into applications such as amusement and automotive”

OpenGL Developer Tools
An increasing number of OpenGL-related tools are being made available to the industry including Apple’s OpenGL Profiler and Driver Monitor which is free to developers and support Macintosh OS X – more information at http://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/opengl/opengl_serious.html.

NVIDIA’s NVPerfKit 2.0 includes NVPerfSDK allows to access performance counters from OpenGL applications and GLExpert to performance analyze and debug OpenGL applications.

—
OpenGL and OpenGL ES Tools: 

gDEBugger V2.5 adds first public beta of gDEBugger ES –

“Graphic Remedy, the makers of gDEBugger and gDEBugger ES, specializes in software applications for the 3D graphics market, specifically tools for 3D graphics developers.  The company’s mission is to design innovative tools that make 3D graphics programming faster and easier, to save programmers time and money, and to improve graphics application performance and reliability.  The company is a Contributor member in the OpenGL ARB and in the Khronos Group.”
gDEBugger is a powerful OpenGL debugger and profiler that traces application activity on top of the OpenGL API so you can find bugs and optimize application rendering performance. The new v2.5 contains the first publci bDEBugger ES beta version and brings all of gDEBugger’s debugging and profiling abilities to the OpenGL ES developer’s world. In addition gDEBugger ES acts as an emulator for OpenGL ES when working on Windows PC while using its own OpenGL ES implementation. gDEBugger is available as a 30-day free trial. To test the OpenGL ES debugger, follow the steps at http://www.gremedy.com/gDEBuggerES_setup.php).

gDEBugger – a Professional OpenGL Debugger and Profiler

Come to the session and the booth to check out “gDEBugger: An OpenGL and OpenGL ES debugging and profiling tool from Graphic Remedy”

Provides graphic pipeline information needed to find bugs and to optimize application performance:
- Shortens debugging and profiling time
- Improves application quality
- Optimizes application performance
“gDEBugger has become an important tool when resolving OpenGL issues with our developers. By allowing us to communicate the exact GL calls that are incorrect, we can clearly demonstrate situations where rendering artifacts are caused by an application error. This resulted in saving a lot of time assisting the developer in fixing their application.”  Sébastien Dominé, Manager of Developer Technology Tools, NVIDIA
“Gelato performance improved after the first pass through gDEBugger. The Gelato team uses gDEBugger daily to visually debug complex GPGPU algorithms.”  Daniel Wexler, Gelato Developer, NVIDIA Digital Film Group
“gDEBugger has given us an easy and quick way of debugging the rendering pipeline. Within 20 minutes of using the product I was able to identify 3 rendering bottlenecks, and one OpenGL error. In the past, two of these errors would have gone unnoticed (Probably indefinitely). Another nice feature is the texture logging. When using multi pass rendering to render to a texture, it becomes easy to see the exact rendered output of that pass. gDEBugger is a great tool, and I’ll recommend it to anyone Using OpenGL. It’s a Must Have.”  Maarten “McClaw” Kronberger, Sulaco,  emperion-empire


Academic Program – Developer Tool

Free gDEBugger License for Academic users!

The new OpenGL ARB and Graphic Remedy Academic Program allows for License of the full feature version for one year, iIncludes all software updates, and a limited number of free licenses are available for non-commercial developers who are not in academia.  More details: http://academic.gremedy.com

Stimulating demand is always a good thing…  Anyone trying to get a non-academic non-commerical license will have to jump through hoops to get a license from this special pool, and will have to satisfy some (as yet unnamed?) ARB member that they are indeed non-commercial.  If commercial developers are really so devious and desperate to fool us into giving them one, then hey, let them get addicted to it so that when their license expires, they have no choice but to pay for one in the future.  Producing gDEBugger addicts is what this whole program is about.  J
 
Some day I’d like to see gDEBugger get versioned to address professional and academic markets individually, thereby attracting new users through free academic (but somewhat crippled) versions.  Some crucial convenience features would go into the professional version, so those with the $$ will gladly pay.  Lots of ways to arbitrarily draw lines between versions.  Then the financial crutch provided by the ARB would no longer be needed.  Something to keep in mind, as it would avoid needing gatekeepers to keep developers honest.
 
-Benjamin - ATI
COLLADA TOOLS
For an in-depth lo at the Tools offered by Collada – see other release out today
All the big-name tools support COLLADA: Google Earth, Sketchup, Maya 7, Feeling Viewer, DazStudio, 3dsMax, XSI
Houdini, FX Composer, Collada Test Framework, COLLADA DOM/FX/RT/Refinery, Blender
OLD QUOTE “This new version of COLLADA is accelerating industry adoption and there are already COLLADA 1.4 exporters for leading tools such as 3DStudio, Maya, Blender and Lightwave,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, chairman of the OpenGL ES Working Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA.  “Tools such as NVIDIA’s FX Composer 2.0 and gaming engines ranging from the Unreal Engine and Agent FX; to open source software such as Blender and OGRE are incorporating support for COLLADA – making COLLADA not just a specification but a genuine force in the industry to encourage and enable the creation of great gaming content.”

COLLADA supported in most popular 3D content creation tools
The COLLADA 1.4 schema is already supported in many popular 3D content creation applications. COLLADA 1.4 includes core features such as mesh geometry, skinning, morphing, animation and data validation as well as COLLADA FX for defining visual effects and COLLADA Physics for physics effects including rigid body dynamics, rag dolls, constraints and collision volumes.

SOFTIMAGE|XSI v.5.1 (http://www.softimage.com/products/xsi/) is advanced animated character production software for game titles. The built-in COLLADA exporter and importer in XSI allow you to exchange 3D data with any digital content creation tool that supports COLLADA 1.4 including support for COLLADA FX shaders.

Maya using the free ColladaMaya plug-in (http://www.feelingsoftware.com/content/view/55/72/lang,en/) Maya is an integrated 3D modeling, animation, effects and rendering solution used by film and video artists, game developers, and visualization professionals.. The open source COLLADA plug-in for Maya supports importing/exporting Maya scenes using COLLADA 1.4.

3ds Max using the free ColladaMax plug-in (http://www.feelingsoftware.com/content/view/65/79/lang,en/) 3ds Max is a leading application for 3D animation for game development, design visualization, visual effects, and education. The open source COLLADA importer and exporter plug-in for 3ds Max supports all COLLADA 1.4 core features (e.g. animation and skinning) and a subset of ColladaFX.

Blender using the free ColladaBlender plug-in (http://colladablender.illusoft.com/) Blender is a popular open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback.. This COLLADA plugin for blender is a script to import from and export to the Collada 1.4 format.

Sketchup 5 (beta) (http://sketchup.google.com/) Sketchup is an asy-to-learn 3D modeling program whose few simple tools enable you to create 3D models with details and textures

FX Composer 2 (beta) (http://developer.nvidia.com/object/fx_composer_home.html) FX Composer 2 provides a state-of-the-art integrated development environment for shader authoring in Cg and HLSL through COLLADA FX. Currently available only to PLAYSTATION 3 developers.

Houdini 8.1 (beta) (http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=5729) Houdini is a family of advanced 3D animation and special effects software for use in film. The new v8.1 adds COLLADA import.

COLLADA supported in most popular 3D applications and middleware

Google Earth 4 (beta) (http://earth.google.com) Google Earth offers a virtual globe of the planet which users can populate with maps, overlays, and 3D models. The new v4 supports import of textured COLLADA 3D models.

Unreal Engine 3 (http://www.unrealtechnology.com) Unreal Engine 3 is a complete game development framework for next-generation consoles and DirectX9-equipped PC’s, providing the vast array of core technologies, content creation tools, and support infrastructure required by top game developers. It is using COLLADA to transport content between all the DCC tools to the game engine tools.

 

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices.  All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

 

COLLADA gains momentum

COLLADA gains fast traction with new members, developer support and first book

1st August, 2006 - SIGGRAPH, Boston, Massachusetts - The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce the rapid industry acceptance of COLLADA, open standard XML-based digital asset exchange schema for interactive 3D applications. Originally targeted for exchange of content in a game environment, COLLADA can be effectively applied in nearly any area of 3D content creation. The addition of shading effects and physics to COLLADA 1.4 in March 2006 has enabled thousands of game artists and developers to create and use hundreds of COLLADA-based tools to author and process their next-generation game assets. COLLADA 1.4 includes core features such as mesh geometry, skinning, morphing, animation and data validation as well as COLLADA FX for defining visual effects and COLLADA Physics for physics effects including rigid body dynamics, rag dolls, constraints and collision volumes. The COLLADA specification, documentation, and sample code is available on the Khronos.org website at http://www.khronos.org/collada.

“We have been pleasantly surprised to find how fast game developers picking up and working with COLLADA as soon as we made it available for download,” said Mark Barnes, chairman of the COLLADA work group. “COLLADA has been available for just one year as an open standard, and every major software tool already supports COLLADA and it is being used in the development of literally thousands of games.” 

Widespread 3D Authoring Tools Support
COLLADA 1.4 is now supported by the industry’s leading 3D authoring tools including 3ds Max, Blender, DAZ|Studio, Feeling Viewer, FX Composer, Google Earth, Houdini, Maya, Sketchup, and XSI as well as Khronos’ COLLADA Test Framework, COLLADA DOM/FX/RT/Refinery.

DAZ Productions Inc., is a new Khronos member and a leading developer of professional quality 3D models and software, has announced the immediate release of their COLLADA exporter. Users of DAZ|Studio software can now export digital content into the COLLADA file format for use within any other COLLADA developer tool. Both DAZ|Studio and the COLLADA exporter are available at no charge on the DAZ3D.com website.

“DAZ is moving with the momentum of the industry and has just joined Khronos to help evolve the COLLADA standard - we are fortunate to be among such luminaries in the 3D world,” said Dan Farr, president of DAZ Productions. “We’re also very excited about the prospect of game developers now being able to more readily take advantage of our rich library of 3D content - COLLADA is fulfilling its promise of enabling a thriving tools and content ecosystem that can benefit tools vendors and content developer alike.”

Google Earth adds COLLADA Support>
Google Earth offers a virtual globe of the planet which users can populate with maps, overlays, and 3D models. The new Google Earth v4 supports import of COLLADA through KML v2.1 to enable users to import COLLADA models such as buildings, monuments, and statues with full support for textures and increased performance through level of detailing for both place marks and high-resolution imagery.

Feeling Software announces COLLADA Viewer
The Feeling Viewer from Feeling Software now supports all the features available in the COLLADA 3D file format including advanced shading effects, complex animations (e.g. skinning and morphing) and physics. The underlying C++ engine is extensible and has been integrated in several third party applications. A free windows version download is available at http://www.feelingsoftware.com/content/view/40/66/lang/en/.

Unreal Engine supports COLLADA
Unreal Engine 3 is a complete game development framework for next-generation consoles and gaming PC’s, providing the vast array of core technologies, content creation tools, and support infrastructure required by top game developers. It is using COLLADA to transport content between all the DCC tools to the game engine tools. More information at http://www.unrealtechnology.com.
First COLLADA Book
During SIGGRAPH 2006, AK Peters will be releasing the first book about COLLADA: “COLLADA: Sailing the Gulf of 3D Digital Content Creation.” This book explains in detail how to use the COLLADA technology in a project utilizing 3D assets, and ultimately how to create an effective content creation pipeline for the most complex development. It was created as a guide to the COLLADA 1.4 specification with the goal of providing readers with all the information that will help them understand the concepts, learn how the technology is already implemented by various tools, and provide guidance for using COLLADA in their applications.

“This book makes available the results of a joint industry effort, spearheaded by Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc., to create a standard for digital asset exchange that enables Playstation® 3 to bring more realistic content to life and into the home like never before.”
Ken Kutaragi, President and CEO Sony Computer Entertainment

COLLADA at SIGGRAPH 2006, Boston, July 31st to August 4th 2006
Any members of the press and industry are invited to visit the Khronos Booth #611 to see demonstrations by Khronos Group members and to attend any Khronos-sponsored events:

• Tech Talk: OpenGL ES, OpenVG & OpenKODE - Wednesday 2nd August 10AM-3:30PM, Room 206A
• OpenGL BOF - Wednesday 2nd August 4-6PM Room 206A
• COLLADA BOF & Social Event - Wednesday 2nd August 6-8PM Room 206A
• OpenGL ES BOF - Thursday 3rd August 10AM-12PM Room 251
• Tech Talk: COLLADA - Thursday 3rd August 12-2PM Room 251

More details at http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/siggraph_2006

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. . Please go to www.khronos.org for more information.

OpenGL ARB and Khronos

Significant roadmap synergy and close cooperation under a single body will enable OpenGL family of standards to accelerate advanced 3D deployment on diverse platforms

31st July, 2006 - SIGGRAPH, Boston, Massachusetts - The Khronos™ Group  is pleased to announce that the OpenGL® ARB (Architecture Review Board), the governing body for OpenGL, has voted to transfer control of the OpenGL API standard to the Khronos Group. The Khronos Group has voted to establish an OpenGL Working Group that will control and evolve this vital standard for cross-platform 3D graphics with significantly enhanced participation as ARB companies join over one hundred Khronos members involved in creating open standards for dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms. The full transfer of the OpenGL specification to Khronos is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2006 with full support for the OpenGL API and its evolution to continue uninterrupted during this transition with full updates on both http://www.opengl.org and http://www.khronos.org.

The OpenGL ARB and the Khronos Group have long collaborated to ensure consistency in the OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenML, COLLADA and OpenGL SC standards. As a result of this transition all OpenGL specification-related activities will now occur under the single Khronos participation framework to enable fully-integrated cooperation between these related standards activities so that the OpenGL family may form the foundation for a coherent set of standards to bring advanced 3D graphics to all hardware platforms and operating systems - from supercomputers to jet fighters to cell phones. The multi-track Khronos organization ensures a constructive balance between inter-working group synergy while still enabling each working group to make focused decisions to meet the needs of its own target market.

“The evolution of the OpenGL API and the membership of the ARB have reflected the changes in the graphics industry over the years as the use of 3D graphics moved from high-end workstations and simulators to PCs and mobile laptops, thanks to a new generation of consumer-oriented companies such as Apple, ATI and NVIDIA,” observes ARB secretary Jon Leech. “Now 3D acceleration is moving to cell phones and OpenGL is there too as OpenGL ES, the successful subset of OpenGL for embedded systems created within the Khronos Group. We have decided to move the OpenGL specification into Khronos to ensure the future health of OpenGL in all its forms.”

This transition will enable Khronos to coordinate a joint roadmap strategy for OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenGL SC and COLLADA specification to maximize synergies between the various members of the OpenGL API-related standards family to accelerate its architectural evolution to support advanced programmable features while minimizing differences between diverse platforms. Additionally, COLLADA will be enabled to form a vital link to authoring platforms for both OpenGL and OpenGL ES standards, and Khronos will be able to leverage work in its cross-platform EGL standard to augment and perhaps eventually replace the GLX/WGL/AGL platform-specific variations.

“As a long-time Promoter Level member of the Khronos Group and the OpenGL ARB, ATI strongly supports the transition of the OpenGL specifications and workgroups to the Khronos Group,” said Robert Feldstein, vice president, engineering, ATI Technologies. “The communities for OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenVG, and other Khronos standards will enjoy the advantages of working more directly together. We envision that OpenGL will continue to evolve into a coherent family of APIs focused on bringing advanced graphics processing everywhere.”

Also as a result of this transition, Khronos will be able to leverage shared effort on generating OpenGL API-related SDKs and documentation. For example, the OpenGL extension registry will grow into a registry database for all the Khronos APIs - providing software developers with a valuable centralized informational resource.

“This transition ensures OpenGL’s rightful place as the foundation for advanced 3D graphics on almost every platform in the industry as we combine the intellectual firepower of the ARB OpenGL architects with the significant commercial momentum of OpenGL ES,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA strongly supports this next step in OpenGL’s evolution as we see both desktop and mobile industries benefiting from an integrated roadmap for OpenGL, OpenGL ES and COLLADA.”

See Khronos at SIGGRAPH 2006, Boston, July 31st to August 4th 2006
Any members of the press and industry are invited to visit the Khronos Booth #611 to see demonstrations by Khronos Group members and to attend any Khronos-sponsored events:

• Tech Talk: OpenGL ES, OpenVG & OpenKODE - Wednesday 2nd August 10AM-3:30PM, Room 206A
• OpenGL BOF - Wednesday 2nd August 4-6PM Room 206A
• COLLADA BOF & Social Event - Wednesday 2nd August 6-8PM Room 206A
• OpenGL ES BOF - Thursday 3rd August 10AM-12PM Room 251
• Tech Talk: COLLADA - Thursday 3rd August 12-2PM Room 251

More details at http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/siggraph_2006.

About OpenGL
The OpenGL graphics system specification allows developers to incorporate a broad set of rendering, texture mapping, special effects and other powerful visualization functions and provides a graphics pipeline that allows unfettered access to graphics hardware acceleration. Since its introduction by SGI in 1992, the OpenGL standard has become the industry’s most widely used and supported 3D and 2D graphics API. The OpenGL API is supported on all major computer platforms, including AIX®, HP-UX®, IRIX®, Linux®, Mac® OS X, Microsoft® Windows® 2000 and Windows® XP and Solaris™. With broad industry support, the OpenGL API is the vendor-neutral, graphics standard that enables 3D graphics on multiple platforms ranging from cell-phones to supercomputers. OpenGL’s It’s consistent backwards compatibility has created a stable foundation for sophisticated graphics on a wide variety of operating systems for over 10 years. The OpenGL specification is constantly evolving state-of-the-art functionality to efficiently support a wide array of applications from consumer games to professional design applications.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. . Please go to www.khronos.org for more information.

Apple, Dell and Google

Significant new membership reinforces Khronos’ position as the preeminent body creating open standards for the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media

31st July, 2006 - SIGGRAPH, Boston, Massachusetts - The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that Acrodea, Apple, DAZ3D, Dell, Google, Gremedy, Codeplay, and S3 Graphics have joined well over one hundred existing Khronos Group Members to define open standards for the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on platforms ranging from embedded systems such as mobile phones to high-performance desktop and workstation systems. This significant growth in membership, together with the announcement made today that the OpenGL ARB has voted to bring control of the OpenGL standard under Khronos, reinforces Khronos’ position as the preeminent body creating open, royalty-free standards for the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms. Khronos has extensive membership from all aspects of the industry including CPU and media silicon providers, operating system vendors, system and handset OEMS, middleware vendors, games and application developers and wireless carriers. Any interested company may join Khronos for just $5,000 a year - further details about joining Khronos at: http://www.khronos.org/members/.

“Khronos has been leading the charge in media standards for the mobile industry for over four years, and now with this increased membership and the integration of the OpenGL ARB, Khronos has truly become the place to be if your company has any interest in open standards for dynamic media and graphics on any platform,” said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of the Tiburon CA based market research firm Jon Peddie Research. “The lines continue to blur between different classes of devices - and so it is crucial to have a single body that is able to drive a coherent set of cross-platform standards to create new market opportunities for the entire graphics and media industry.”

“Codeplay has long focused on optimizing compilers to create the best user experience for graphical applications; and we are delighted to now be a Contributing Member of Khronos,” said Andrew Richards, managing director and chief software architect at Codeplay. “It will be a privilege to work alongside other industry leaders in what is the pre-eminent standards setting body for the embedded graphics software world.”

“In becoming a member of the Khronos Group, DAZ is moving with the momentum of the industry said Dan Farr, president of DAZ Productions. “Our mission has always been to make our products easy-to-use and accessible to everyone. Technologies like COLLADA will enable thousands of game artists and developers to integrate our rich library of 3D content into their pipeline.”

“Graphic Remedy has joined the Khronos Group to help pushing the OpenGL and OpenGL ES standards forward, making them the dominant Graphic APIs. We believe that our product offering will leverage the Khronos APIs ecosystem by adding it our powerful debugging and profiling tools. As a contributor member, we will advance these open standard APIs to include debugging and profiling support.”

“S3 Graphics is pleased to join Khronos as a Contributor member participating in the development process for OpenGL and OpenGL ES specifications and related media APIs,” said Iming Pai, vice president of software engineering at S3 Graphics. “S3 Graphics believes that open APIs like OpenGL and OpenGL ES are crucial to the rapid distribution of advanced GPU technologies across a wide variety of platforms. We are fully committed to supporting these open APIs on S3 Graphics’ 3D graphics chips.”

“We welcome all our new members as their expertise and market presence ensures that Khronos can accurately create standards that meet the needs of the entire industry,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. “Khronos has now has the widespread industry participation needed to effectively leverage synergies between established and emerging media platforms - and so create new market opportunities for both.”

See Khronos at SIGGRAPH 2006, Boston, July 31st to August 4th 2006
Any members of the press and industry are invited to visit the Khronos Booth #611 to see demonstrations by Khronos Group members and to attend any Khronos-sponsored events:

• Tech Talk: OpenGL ES, OpenVG & OpenKODE - Wednesday 2nd August 10AM-3:30PM, Room 206A
• OpenGL BOF - Wednesday 2nd August 4-6PM Room 206A
• COLLADA BOF & Social Event - Wednesday 2nd August 6-8PM Room 206A
• OpenGL ES BOF - Thursday 3rd August 10AM-12PM Room 251
• Tech Talk: COLLADA - Thursday 3rd August 12-2PM Room 251

More details at http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/siggraph_2006.

About OpenGL
The OpenGL graphics system specification allows developers to incorporate a broad set of rendering, texture mapping, special effects and other powerful visualization functions and provides a graphics pipeline that allows unfettered access to graphics hardware acceleration. Since its introduction by SGI in 1992, the OpenGL standard has become the industry’s most widely used and supported 3D and 2D graphics API. The OpenGL API is supported on all major computer platforms, including AIX®, HP-UX®, IRIX®, Linux®, Mac® OS X, Microsoft® Windows® 2000 and Windows® XP and Solaris™. With broad industry support, the OpenGL API is the vendor-neutral, graphics standard that enables 3D graphics on multiple platforms ranging from cell-phones to supercomputers. OpenGL’s It’s consistent backwards compatibility has created a stable foundation for sophisticated graphics on a wide variety of operating systems for over 10 years. The OpenGL specification is constantly evolving state-of-the-art functionality to efficiently support a wide array of applications from consumer games to professional design applications.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. . Please go to www.khronos.org for more information.

Bellagio OpenMAX for Linux

Khronos announces Bellagio OpenMAX IL Open Source Sample Implementation

Enables Linux software developers and ISVs to develop their own OpenMAX components including codecs, video I/O, and audio mixers

27nd June, 2006 - San Francisco, California - The Khronos™ Group announced that STMicroelectronics has released v0.2 of their open source sample implementation of the OpenMAX IL specification for Linux. The OpenMAX IL API defines a standardized media component interface to enable developers and platform providers to integrate and communicate with multimedia codecs implemented in hardware or software. The Bellagio OpenMAX IL sample implementation is for Linux on x86 PC and on ARM platforms.

Bellagio enables Linux software developers and ISVs to familiarize themselves with OpenMAX IL API and to develop their own OpenMAX components. They can then use this experience to create components for a variety of hardware platforms. Developers are recommended to have experience with C, especially in multithreaded embedded environments based on Linux.

The new v0.2 release of Bellagio includes the libomxil shared library together with the OpenMAX IL core, an MP3 decoder software component, a basic volume control and one audio sink software component (ALSA sink). All of these components comply with the OpenMAX base and interoperability profiles, i.e. they can be tunnelled together. Bellagio is available for download on sourceforge and includes sample code (http://omxil.sourceforge.net/).

This new release was specifically designed to make it easier for developers to create new OpenMAX components. Examples of OpenMAX components that can be developed based on Bellagio include codecs (e.g. Voice over IP,  video codecs), audio mixers and audio effects components, and video I/O components (e.g. Video4Linux).  .

STMicroelectronics is creating a set of GStreamer plug-ins that use Bellagio OpenMAX IL components. GStreamer is a multimedia framework for Linux for developing a range of multimedia components applications ranging from simple Ogg/Vorbis playback to audio mixing and non-linear video editing. Linux-based devices such as the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet use GStreamer for multimedia support. The Bellagio GStreamer plug-ins will enable any applications based on GStreamer to leverage multimedia acceleration for free!

“Simply using a GStreamer plug-ins with OpenMAX IL support, will give applications access to multimedia acceleration. This is the beauty of the Khronos OpenMAX IL approach.” said Diego Melpignano, lead development engineer from STMicroelectronics.

In addition to working with existing multimedia frameworks like GStreamer,  Bellagio OpenMAX components can also be used directly by an application. STMicroelectronics for example, has a prototype running on Nomadik™ System-on-Chip of a Voice over IP client using OpenMAX components. When hardware acceleration is added, there will be considerable power savings for the platform.

“STMicroelectronics is pleased to contribute to this open source implementation, and to help broaden the awareness of the OpenMAX IL API as a standard to control multimedia components in future terminals,” said Amedeo Zuccaro, Director of the Secure Entertainment and Multimedia Platform, Advanced System Technology, STMicroelectronics.

OpenMAX IL (Integration Layer) is the first of three layers of the overall OpenMAX royalty-free open standard from the Khronos Group that will provide 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. OpenMAX DL (Development Layer)  contains a comprehensive set of audio, video and imaging functions. OpenMAX AL (Application Layer) defines a set of APIs providing a standardized interface between an application and multimedia middleware where multimedia middleware provides the services needed to perform expected API functionality.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to www.khronos.org for more information.

COLLADA gains momentum

Google Earth and Sketchup add to the list of supporting applications

22nd June, 2006 - San Francisco, California - The Khronos™ Group announced that new version of KML, the geographic markup language for Google Earth, supports the COLLADA digital asset exchange schema.  COLLADA enables Google Earth to take advantage of 3D models with enhanced geometry and support for textures for greater realism. Simply create a 3D model in any popular digital content creation software such as Maya, SOFTIMAGE|XSI, 3ds Max, Blender or Sketchup, add in photorealistic textures, export the model in COLLADA 1.4 format, and then import or drag and drop them into Google Earth.

COLLADA is an open standard XML-based digital asset exchange schema designed to transport data between 3D content creation tools and applications. It is specifically designed to let different content tools operate together in the same workflow and create efficient production pipelines. For applications that take advantage of COLLADA technology, this means you can move content freely from one application, add in additional features in another (e.g. shaders, physics, polygon optimization), and then pass the COLLADA document on to the next in a tool chain sequence. COLLADA is primarily targeted for the exchange of assets in a game pipeline, but it can be used in any area of 3D content creation that requires an intermediate format and good tool interoperability. By enabling a better tool chain, more tools are available to content developers. This in turn makes it easier to create better content at lower cost. 

Google Earth is the first mainstream real-time 3D application and it is driving a new way of using the Internet based on 3D visualization, community and geospatial location. In selecting COLLADA as the format for geometry and textures, Google Earth can now be populated with high quality 3D content from popular content creation tools. After only a few days since the KML 2.1 announcement the Google 3D Warehouse is already rich with textured COLLADA content from 3D modelers and game content creators.  Look for models with textures which are marked as downloadable by Google Earth V4.

COLLADA supported in most popular 3D content creation tools

The COLLADA 1.4 schema is already supported in many popular 3D content creation applications as well as middleware and 3D applications. COLLADA 1.4 includes core features such as mesh geometry, skinning, morphing, animation and data validation as well as COLLADA FX for defining visual effects and COLLADA Physics for physics effects including rigid body dynamics, rag dolls, constraints and collision volumes.

SOFTIMAGE|XSI v.5.1 -  SOFTIMAGE|XSI is advanced animated character production software for game titles. The built-in COLLADA exporter and importer in XSI allow you to exchange 3D data with any digital content creation tool that supports COLLADA 1.4 including support for COLLADA FX shaders.

Maya using the free ColladaMaya plug-in Maya is an integrated 3D modeling, animation, effects and rendering solution used by film and video artists, game developers, and visualization professionals. The open source COLLADA plug-in for Maya supports importing/exporting Maya scenes using COLLADA 1.4.

3ds Max using the free ColladaMax plug-in - 3ds Max is a leading application for 3D animation for game development, design visualization, visual effects, and education. The open source COLLADA importer and exporter plug-in for 3ds Max supports all COLLADA 1.4 core features (e.g. animation and skinning) and a subset of ColladaFX.

Blender using the free ColladaBlender plug-in - Blender is a popular open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. This COLLADA plugin for blender is a script to import from and export to the Collada 1.4 format.

Sketchup 5 (beta) -  Sketchup is an easy-to-learn 3D modeling program whose few simple tools enable you to create 3D models with details and textures

FX Composer 2 (beta) -  FX Composer 2 provides a state-of-the-art integrated development environment for shader authoring in Cg and HLSL through COLLADA FX. (Currently available only to PLAYSTATION 3 developers.)

Houdini 8.1 (beta) - Houdini is advanced 3D animation and special effects software for use in film. The new v8.1 adds COLLADA import.
3D applications and middleware

Google Earth 4 (beta) - Google Earth offers a virtual globe of the planet which users can populate with maps, overlays, and 3D models. The new v4 supports import of textured COLLADA 3D models.

Unreal Engine 3 - Unreal Engine 3 is a complete game development framework for next-generation consoles and PC’s, providing the core technologies, content creation tools, and support infrastructure required by game developers. It is using COLLADA to transport content between DCC tools and the game engine tools.

Kynapse 4 - Kynapse is a middleware solution for large scale A.I. behavior simulation that lets non player characters move around in any 3D dynamic world, communicate and cooperate.  The new v4 supports COLLADA import.

Tool Developers can add COLLADA support to their applications

Implementing COLLADA support in a 3D modeling tool is a straight forward process and can be handled in one of several ways:

• Use the open source COLLADA-DOM to enable load, save and modification in place of the data. COLLADA DOM uses LibXML to parse the COLLADA documents. The XML parser is a plug-in to COLLADA DOM, so you can replace it with your favorite parser. FX Composer 2.0 and Google Earth are using COLLADA-DOM as a loader
• Use the open source FCOLLADA C++ library to create their own tools for import/export. FCOLLADA is used for the ColladaMax and ColladaMaya plug-ins.
• Parse the XML themselves or they can use an automatic API generation tool for the COLLADA schema, such as for C# in Visual Studio 2005. SOFTIMAGE|XSI and BlenderCollada directly parse the XML.
• Use the COLLADA RT sample code that reads in a COLLADA document via the COLLADA-DOM and converts the structures into a form that is easier to use for a rendering / game engine purposes.  It includes static libraries so developers can use COLLADA RT as an import API.

Learning more about COLLADA

During SIGGRAPH ‘06, AK Peters will be releasing the first book about COLLADA:  “COLLADA: Sailing the Gulf of 3D Digital Content Creation”.  This book explains in detail how to use the COLLADA technology in a project utilizing 3D assets, and ultimately how to create an effective content creation pipeline for the most complex development. It was created as a guide to the COLLADA 1.4 specification with the goal of providing readers with all the information that will help them understand the concepts, learn how the technology is already implemented by various tools, and provide guidance for using COLLADA in their applications.

The COLLADA specification, documentation, and sample code is available on the Khronos.org website at http://www.khronos.org/collada.

More About COLLADA
COLLADA is an intermediate format whose primary goal is to simplify the workflow between the different tools and the game engine. As an intermediate format, a COLLADA file can be broken into pieces that can be individually processed by the best tool. For example one COLLADA document may only contain physics data. The shader data may be contained in another COLLADA document. COLLADA is designed so that data can be split the way the user needs it for its particular tool chain. The data is even organized in libraries of specific type to help with this process (ie: shader and physics data is not mixed in COLLADA so it is easy to separate).  You can simply merge the shaders and the physics later on in your pipeline or in the final applications.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to www.khronos.org for more information.

COLLADA 1.4 released

SOFTIMAGE|XSI v.5.1 now includes COLLADA 1.4 support; COLLADA 1.4 includes a 3D digital asset schema, a shader FX framework and the industry’s first Physics Data Definition for 3D APIs

22nd March, 2006 - Game Developer Conference (GDC), San Jose, California - The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that the new, royalty-free COLLADA™ 1.4 specification has been ratified and released under the Khronos standardization process; that Emdigo, Feeling Software and Softimage have joined as New Members to participate in further development of COLLADA and other Khronos technologies; and that in another press release yesterday, Softimage has announced that SOFTIMAGE|XSI v.5.1 now includes COLLADA 1.4 support.

“The rapid evolution of COLLADA and the news that big players like Softimage have joined the Khronos Group, is positive proof that Khronos is a very effective new home for COLLADA,” said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of the Tiburon CA based market research firm, Jon Peddie Research. “Sony and all the others members of the COLLADA Work Group have demonstrated a clear commitment to evolving the specification and driving ecosystem of tools, conformance tests and sample implementations.”

COLLADA 1.4 represents a significant advance in asset, shader and physics data format definitions enabling 3D authoring applications to freely exchange digital assets without loss of information. COLLADA 1.4 has been developed by numerous companies including 3Dlabs, Alias, AGEIA, Autodesk, ATI, Feeling Software, NVIDIA and Softimage; and has been reviewed by over sixty game developers to ensure that it enables multiple software packages to be seamlessly combined into powerful game production pipelines. The COLLADA 1.4 specification is available for adoption and royalty-free use by the industry at www.khronos.org/collada/.

“We have joined the Khronos Group to participate in the development of COLLADA and OpenGL ES as an important part of Emdigo’s strategy is to leverage industry standards as key components of our products,” said Steve Gleitsmann, President of Emdigo Inc. “This makes the content download business more accessible and cost effective for our customers who will no longer have to worry about proprietary technologies that limit their ability to deliver a great variety of content from a large number of sources to their consumers.”

“Every day, thousands of game artists and developers use COLLADA-based tools to author and process their next-generation game assets. With the addition of shading effects and physics to COLLADA 1.4, we expect this adoption rate to significantly accelerate,” said Christian Laforte, CEO, Feeling Software. “Technologies such as COLLADA and OpenGL ES enable exciting new games, graphical applications and devices that are becoming an integral part of our everyday life. This resonates strongly with the Feeling Software spirit. This is why we are thrilled to join the Khronos Group and to further contribute to this next wave of 3D innovation. “
“We are leveraging the strengths of XML and XML Schema to provide better content models for your game data in COLLADA 1.4,” said Mark Barnes, chairman of the Khronos COLLADA working group. “COLLADA FX has a well defined structure that can be parsed and validated more easily then other effects formats that rely on scripts. By working with standard technologies, industry leading companies and open source developers alike, we are defining a standard format that expands the tool horizon for artists and developers, enabling these creative people to use the best tools available to create the amazing experiences of next generation games.”
“This new version of COLLADA is accelerating industry adoption and there are already COLLADA 1.4 exporters for leading tools such as 3DStudio, Maya, Blender and Lightwave,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, chairman of the OpenGL ES Working Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. “Tools such as NVIDIA’s FX Composer 2.0 and gaming engines ranging from the Unreal Engine and Agent FX; to open source software such as Blender and OGRE are incorporating support for COLLADA - making COLLADA not just a specification but a genuine force in the industry to encourage and enable the creation of great gaming content.”
The COLLADA 1.4 data digital asset schema is the first cross-platform standard shader and effects definition written in XML and includes core features such as mesh geometry, skinning, morphing, animation and data validation. This new version of the digital asset schema will enable content creation pipelines that can automatically condition and scale 3D geometry and texture assets for real-time playback on a wide diversity of platforms including hand-held devices.
COLLADA FX, new in version 1.4, supports high-level and shader effects with next generation lighting, shading and texturing capabilities and supports DX shader models 1.x, 2.0 and 3.0 under the Cg and GLSL profiles. Khronos and members of the COLLADA working group are developing open source example code for COLLADA and will release a COLLADA conformance test suite during 2006.
COLLADA 1.4 standardizes three related data formats for flexible data exchange between state-of-the-art authoring applications to provide the creative power needed to forge today’s leading gaming content. The COLLADA 1.4 digital asset schema enables lossless 3D data exchange while fully preserving asset data, triples the number of supported data elements compared to COLLADA 1.3 and provides strongly-typed definitions for improved validation of content data.  COLLADA FX is the industry’s first cross-platform standard for defining visual effects that targets both high-end systems such as gaming consoles as well as embedded and hand-held systems. Effects may be authored to support many different profiles which may include the use of the OpenGL Shading Language, NVIDIA’s Cg shading language, or OpenGL ES 1.1 state setting and texture combiners. COLLADA Physics is the industry’s first open standard data definition for physics effects including rigid body dynamics, rag dolls, constraints and collision volumes enabling data interchange between AGEIA (Novodex), Havok, Meqon, ODE and other game physics middle-ware.

See COLLADA Demos at Game Developer Conference on Khronos Booth #1632
There will be COLLADA demos by Emdigo and Softimage on the Khronos Booth at GDC. Emdigo will demonstrate its Go3D system, an advanced content platform that enables wireless service providers, publishers and content aggregators to rapidly deliver vast amounts of dazzling, real-time 3D graphics based mobile entertainment content and messaging applications. The Emdigo content platform leverages both the COLLADA content exchange format as well as OpenGL-ES implementations on industry leading handsets.

Softimage Co., a subsidiary of Avid Technology, Inc., will demonstrate a workflow for next-generation games character authoring based on the COLLADA standard file format. The presentation will include character animation and realtime visual effects creation using SOFTIMAGE®|XSI® and NVIDIA’s FXComposer 2.

COLLADA offers educational sessions at Game Developer Conference, March 20-24

http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/gdc_2006/
• Full Day GDC Tutorial: Graphics Rendering With OpenGL ES
• Mobile 3D Development and COLLADA
• Collada for Playstation3
• M3ds Max Data Exchange Interface (previously known as IGame) and COLLADA
• COLLADA Panel

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to www.khronos.org for more information.

 

Monotype Imaging, Scaleform, TAT

Khronos Announces New Members Monotype Imaging, Scaleform, TAT and Accelerated OpenVG Demonstrations

OpenVG a catalyst for widespread adoption of 2D vector graphics hardware for mobile; stimulates development of advanced high quality 2D applications and user interfaces

22nd March, 2006 - Game Developer Conference (GDC), San Jose, California - The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that numerous members are now shipping devices accelerating OpenVG™ 1.0, a royalty-free, open standard for low-level 2D vector graphics, and that new members Monotype Imaging, Scaleform and TAT have joined to participate in ongoing development of the API. 

OpenVG enables hardware acceleration of libraries such as Flash and SVG, enabling high-quality, anti-aliased, scalable 2D vector graphics on embedded and handheld devices with highly interactive performance and low levels of power consumption. The OpenVG standard has been designed to seamlessly interoperate with OpenGL® ES 3D graphics; creating a high-performance, fully integrated 2D and 3D embedded graphics acceleration environment. The OpenVG API specification is available for free download at http://www.khronos.org/openvg/.

As an open industry standard interface, OpenVG will be an important catalyst for driving widespread adoption of 2D vector graphics hardware for the mobile industry,” said Andrzej Mamona, Architect at ATI and the OpenVG Work Group Chair. “This hardware acceleration will stimulate development of a new class of more complex high quality 2D applications and user interfaces.”

See Demos of OpenVG by Hybrid Graphics, Imagination Technologies, Mitsubishi, Renesas and Scaleform at GDC on the Khronos Booth #1632 at GDC.

Among many other demos, attendees are invited to see Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR MBX combined with the Scaleform VGx vector graphics driver accelerating Flash content using the OpenVG and OpenGL ES APIs.

“Mobile devices need smooth, high-quality 2D vector graphics to enable high-quality user interfaces and ultra-readable text on small screens,” says David McBrien, vice president business development, Imagination Technologies. “With support for the OpenVG standard developed by the Khronos Group, PowerVR can provide a low-power consumption solution with a high level of acceleration for 2D graphics such as SVG, Flash, PDF and Postscript. This accelerated, scalable anti-aliased vector graphics solution opens up new possibilities for advanced UI, navigation applications, games, e-books, screensavers and multimedia content.”

“Bitboys was the first company to introduce a dedicated hardware vector graphics processor to the wireless market. The OpenVG 1.0 compatible Bitboys G12 is extremely compact in size and offers more than 100-fold rendering performance improvement over software-based solutions. This technology will become a standard in wireless devices over the next few years,” said Petri Nordlund, CTO of Bitboys. “You can see our OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics processor Bitboys G40 here at GDC and are invited to see a variety of our OpenVG demos at the Khronos Mobile forum in Tokyo on April 28th.”

“HUONE has developed a software implementation of OpenVG API called “AlexVG engine” and a SVG tiny player running on OpenVG called “AlexVG t-player,” said Hwanyong Lee, HUONE (formerly MTIS). “We released an OpenVG API evaluation version for Windows at CeBit 2006 Hannover, and more than 300 evaluation copies of the CD were distributed, and we expect to distribute evaluation version of AlexVG engine running on the OpenVG API via internet in June 2006.”

“Hybrid sees OpenVG as a crucial graphics technology for mobile phones and other embedded devices, and Hybrid’s OpenVG serves as the acceleration platform for vector-based content formats like SVG and Flash,” says Ville Miettinen, CTO of Hybrid Graphics. “Hybrid has been involved with 2D and SVG since 2002, and now see a strong demand for low-level 2D vector graphics standards.
Hybrid’s commercial OpenVG implementation is already on the market, and our non-commercial version will be made available April, 2006.”

“The adoption of OpenVG as the interface to hardware accelerated 2D vector graphics will propel the development of rich graphical content applications and services,” said Brad Sipes, VP Operations and CTO of Ikivo. “With over 60 million units deployed, Ikivo is the leading provider for vector graphic software for mobile devices. We are uniquely positioned to bring reach media and graphic services to mobile users and leverage the additional performance capabilities that OpenVG enables. Ikivo Multimedia SVG Player, a W3C SVG 1.2 compliant viewer, may be the world’s first commercially available software that integrates to the OpenVG API.”

“Monotype Imaging’s goal is to help ensure that the Khronos OpenVG™ specification will become an efficient hardware acceleration layer for scalable fonts and multilingual text composition, allowing mobile application developers and content creators to benefit from rich graphic capabilities, with the highest quality of scalable, legible text supporting all languages of the world,” said Jack Murphy, vice president of research and development at Monotype Imaging Inc.

“TAT is very happy to join Khronos as a Contributor member and be part of the development process to see that the user interface industry will be well represented,” said Ludvig Linge, CEO of TAT. “TAT believes that the standardization of the graphics hardware interface through APIs like for example OpenGL ES or OpenVG is necessary and will improve the adoption rate of advanced user interfaces.”

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to www.khronos.org for more information.

 

Intel joins as Promoter

Intel Joins Khronos Group as a Promoting Member

Now over 100 companies working together in the Khronos Group on industry-wide APIs for portable, high-performance games and rich media applications

22nd March, 2006 - Game Developer Conference (GDC), San Jose, California - The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that Intel has joined the Khronos Group as a Promoting member and will also hold a seat on the Board of Directors to further advance the evolution of open standards that enable the authoring and acceleration of games and media on a wide variety of platforms and devices, such as mobile phones. Also announced in other Khronos news today, new members Emdigo, Feeling Software, Monotype Imaging, RadVision, Reigncomm, Scaleform, Softimage and TAT bring the total number of companies participating in the Khronos Group to over one hundred. Khronos is an open, member-funded consortium committed to developing royalty-free standards for mobile and embedded markets, including the new OpenKODE initiative to create a coherent development and deployment platform to enable portable, high-performance games and media applications for mobile handsets. Khronos has extensive membership from all aspects of the mobile industry including carriers, handset OEMs, middleware vendors, games developers and CPU and graphics silicon providers. Further details about joining Khronos for any interested company may be found at: http://www.khronos.org/members/.

“Khronos has been at the forefront of creating enabling standards for the mobile industry for many years, and it is good to see even more industry heavyweights such as Intel join the group to ensure this important work continues to gain momentum,” said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of the Tiburon CA based market research firm, Jon Peddie Research.

“We welcome Intel and all our new members, as our extensive open membership ensures that we have the industry representation to ensure our standards genuinely meet the industry’s needs,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. “We invite members of the press and interested developers to come by the Khronos Booth #1632 at Game Developer conference to see dozens of demos of the latest technologies developed by the Khronos Group.”

“Khronos is more than just an open standards group; it is a catalyst for the development of graphically advanced and compelling mobile gaming content and technology,”  said David McBrien, VP business development, Imagination Technologies.  “Our tenure as a Khronos promoting member and working closely with our partners also in the Khronos Group has proven to be a very valuable experience for Imagination Technologies.  We encourage participation in the group by new members, and we are committed to the continuing development of the Khronos Group family of open standards under the OpenKODE platform.”

Advanced media applications, including 3D games, are driving enhanced revenue for the mobile industry by raising the value of advanced handsets, enabling higher games revenue and driving network data service usage. However, the rollout of compelling applications is being held back by disruptive platform variability, forcing software developers to create many different variants of each application, raising costs, and slowing the widespread availability of advanced content. The new OpenKODE initiative will bring together the family of Khronos Application Programming Interfaces (APIs): OpenGL® ES for 3D graphics, OpenMAX™ for streaming media, OpenVG™ for vector 2D graphics and OpenSL ES™ for audio; and will define a new user-input API and potentially add new APIs for access to functionality such as multi-player networking and operating system resources to create a complete, coherently designed, reliably available coding platform that can be implemented across a wide variety of mobile and embedded devices and operating systems - including closed real-time operating systems.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  Please go to www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenMAX and OpenSL ES are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. COLLADA is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. used by permission by Khronos. OpenGL and OpenML are registered trademarks and the OpenGL ES logo is a trademark of Silicon Graphics Inc. used by permission by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

 

OpenMAX DL enables rapid implementation and seamless portability of optimized video, image and audio

Strong support from major silicon vendors; Second of three OpenMAX standards to provide comprehensive streaming media portability

13th February, 2006 - 3GSM, Barcelona - The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that it has ratified and publicly released the royalty-free OpenMAX™ DL 1.0 specification to enable rapid implementation and seamless portability of optimized video, image and audio codecs on diverse silicon architectures. OpenMAX DL defines an Application Programming Interface (API) which contains a comprehensive set of audio, video and imaging functions that can be implemented and optimized on new processors by silicon vendors and then used by codec vendors to code a wide range of codec functionality. OpenMAX adds significant value to OEMs, ODMs and codec and middleware providers by improving time-to-market for advanced codecs on new silicon with significantly reduced software development costs and enables silicon providers to provide an open-standards-based platform for optimized codec development. OpenMAX DL has been developed under the successful Khronos Working Group process, with the support of Khronos member companies including ARM, Freescale, Intel Corporation, Motorola, Nokia and Texas Instruments. The OpenMAX DL 1.0 specification is free for immediate download at http://www.khronos.org/openmax/.

OpenMAX DL has been designed to provide optimized media codec performance on a wide variety of silicon acceleration architectures including programmable CPUs and DSPs, partially programmable hardware engines and parallel architectures including multi-core DSPs. The OpenMAX DL API includes audio signal processing functions such as FFTs and filters, imaging processing primitives such as color space conversion and video processing primitives to enable the optimized implementation of codecs such as MPEG-4, H.264, MP3, AAC and JPEG. OpenMAX supports acceleration concurrency via both iDL, which uses OpenMAX IL constructs, and aDL which adds asynchronous interfaces to the OpenMAX DL API.

OpenMAX DL is the second of three layers of the overall OpenMAX standard that will provide 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 IL (Integration Layer) API defines a standardized media component interface to enable developers and platform providers to integrate and communicate with multimedia codecs implemented in hardware or software. The OpenMAX IL 1.0 specification was publicly released in January 2006. The OpenMAX AL (Application Layer) is an application-level API that will enable streaming media applications to be portable across multiple operating systems and hardware platforms. OpenMAX AL is expected to be released during 2006.

“The rapid development of the OpenMAX DL standard has been driven by the increasingly urgent need of the hardware community to quickly and cheaply ship a wide variety of optimized media codecs on diverse silicon architectures,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. “Platform integrators now have the choice of leveraging OpenMAX DL in the implementation of a wide range of codecs that can be integrated into advanced media frameworks using OpenMAX IL to create comprehensive media acceleration solutions.”

“OpenMAX DL provides an easy way for software developers to rapidly adopt ARM® technologies including our SIMD and NEON™ extensions with minimal development effort,” said John Cornish, vice president of marketing for ARM’s Processor Division. “By providing highly optimized ARM11™/SIMD and Cortex™-A8/NEON libraries for OpenMAX DL, ARM expects to see a wealth of software development taking full advantage of the performance features of these processors early in their product life cycle.” ARM also plans to release a generic reference implementation of OpenMAX DL soon after release of the final specification.
“The Khronos Group continues to make important advancements in the development of open standard APIs that simplify complex software development and accelerate the delivery of multimedia platforms and applications,” said Brandon Tolany, global operations manager of the multimedia applications division for Freescale Semiconductor. “As a founding promoter of the OpenGL® ES and the OpenMAX APIs, we see the OpenMAX DL 1.0 specification as another significant step in the mission to deliver feature-rich devices for the mobile multimedia market.”

“Intel is pleased to have made key contributions to the Khronos Group’s OpenMax DL standard. The optimized OpenMax DL implementation released today on Intel’s Premier Support site will allow customers to leverage Intel Wireless MMX and MMX II technologies using an industry-standard API,” said Mark Casey, general manager of Intel’s Applications Processor Business Unit. “Intel’s efforts enable manufacturers to enhance their multimedia offerings based on Intel XScale® processors via the OpenMax standards while reducing development costs and time to market for media-centric applications.”

“The OpenMAX DL specification represents a collaborative effort among industry representatives to maximize multimedia software efficiency across the mobile value chain,” said Kathy Moseler, chair of the Video DL 1.0 working group and distinguished member of the technical staff, Motorola, Inc. “Motorola is pleased to contribute to the development of this specification and we look forward to realizing key benefits from broader industry implementation—including portability of video, image, audio and speech codecs and image processing functions across component platforms and reduced product time to market.”

About Khronos
Khronos, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenMAX and OpenSL ES are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc.  COLLADA is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. used by permission by Khronos.  OpenGL and OpenML are registered trademarks and the OpenGL ES logo is a trademark of Silicon Graphics Inc. used by permission by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

Khronos Releases OpenMAX IL 1.0 Specification for Standardized Integration of Codecs into Embedded Media Frameworks

First of three OpenMAX standards to provide comprehensive streaming media portability; OpenMAX IL Conformance Tests to be made immediately available

4th January, 2006 –  CES, Las Vegas – The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that it has ratified and publicly released the royalty-free OpenMAX™ IL 1.0 specification that defines media component interfaces to enable the rapid integration of accelerated codecs into streaming media frameworks on embedded devices.  Additionally, Khronos released details today of the OpenMAX IL 1.0 Adopter’s Program, including Conformance Tests to enable conformant products to use the OpenMAX IL trademark to provide reliable, cross-platform audio, video, and image codec interoperability. Additionally, a sample OpenMAX IL implementation for Linux, coded by Texas Instruments, will be freely available in the first quarter of 2006 to enable experimentation with OpenMAX IL functionality by any interested party.  OpenMAX IL has been developed under the successful Khronos Working Group process, with the support of Khronos member companies including ARM, ATI Technologies, Beatnik, Broadcom, Emuzed, Fraunhofer, Freescale, Infineon, Intel, Motorola, Nokia, NVIDIA, Philips, SKY MobileMedia, Samsung, Sasken, Siemens, 
ST Microelectronics and Symbian, and was chaired by Texas Instruments. The OpenMAX IL 1.0 specification is free for download at http://www.khronos.org/openmax/.

The first public demonstration of a prototype of an OpenMAX IL driver will be shown at Lunch@Piero’s, a media-only, invitation-only product showcase across the street from CES being held at the Las Vegas Convention Center on January 5 & 6, 2006.  At Lunch@Piero’s, Khronos will feature OpenMAX IL 1.0 executing an MPEG-4 audio and video decode and display pipeline on a NVIDIA GoForce 3D GPU designed for mobile phones.

OpenMAX IL is the first of three layers of the overall OpenMAX standard that will provide 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 IL (Integration Layer) API defines a standardized media component interface to enable developers and platform providers to integrate and communicate with multimedia codecs implemented in hardware or software.  OpenMAX DL (Development Layer) APIs will enable codec developers to accelerate the creation and portability of codecs with a standardized set of primitive functionality across a range of computing platforms. Ratification and public release of OpenMAX DL 1.0 are expected in the first quarter of 2006. The OpenMAX AL (Application Layer) is an application-level API that will enable streaming media applications to be portable across multiple operating systems and hardware platforms.  OpenMAX AL is expected to be released during 2006.

“OpenMAX has been developed to fulfill an urgent industry need with significant industry support from silicon and software vendors and OEMs, and so we expect this important new standard to enjoy rapid and widespread adoption,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA.  “NVIDIA is fully committed to deploying OpenMAX on its range of embedded GPUs and will demonstrate a prototype OpenMAX IL driver running on its GoForce 3D handheld GPUs at CES.”

“TI has been a very active participant since the inception of the OpenMAX group within Khronos. TI supports and encourages developers to adopt OpenMAX interfaces. TI will be working very closely with customers & partners in deployment of OpenMAX interfaces on OMAP & OMAP Vox class of devices,” stated Avner Goren, director of cellular systems marketing at TI.

“As one of the original founding members of the Khronos group, ATI strongly believes in Open standards as an enabler to the growth of the industry.  ATI is looking forward to deploying OpenMAX interfaces on its Imageon Media Processors in the near future,” said Andrej Zdravkovic, senior director for software development at ATI.

“Beatnik is committed to contributing to the OpenMAX effort and will be supplying OpenMAX IL compliant implementations of our industry standard mobileBAE software audio engine,” said Jeremy Copp, Beatnik’s chief sales officer.  “By delivering technology that fully meets the demands of the OpenMAX IL framework, we are enabling handset manufacturers to reduce integration time as they bring to market products incorporating advanced audio capabilities across a range of hardware, software and operating system platforms.”

“Intel remains committed to the Khronos Group’s OpenGL ES framework and plans to release our OpenMAX IL implementation for Wireless MMX and MMX2 technology early this year, with OpenMAX DL releases later in the year,” said Mark Casey, general manager of Intel’s Applications Processor Business Unit. “Intel’s efforts enable manufacturers to enhance their multimedia offerings based on Intel XScale® processors via the OpenMAX standards while reducing development costs and time to market.”

“SKY MobileMedia, a contributor to the OpenMAX effort, is supporting OpenMAX IL in our second generation SKY-MAP™ 2.0 mobile application software platform,” said Tom Pollard, vice president of marketing for SKY. “When OpenMAX AL is ratified, we plan to also support this standard as part of our core strategy to maximize the portability of our software platforms across the complete range of mobile hardware, codecs, chipsets, and operating systems.”

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as COLLADA™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™ and OpenML™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of 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 media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Announces New OpenKODE Initiative to Define a 
Mobile Media Application Development Environment

New Initiative aims to enable portable, high-performance mobile media applications; 
Open Call for Industry Participation and Contributions

4th January, 2006 –  CES, Las Vegas – The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce the creation of a new open standard working group:  the OpenKODE™ (Khronos Open Development Environment) initiative, which intends to create a coherent development and deployment platform to enable and encourage the development of portable, high-performance media applications for mobile handsets.  This royalty-free standard will be developed under the proven Khronos Working Group process with a target of a first public release within twelve months.  Any company with an interest in this initiative is encouraged to join Khronos and participate in defining the scope, requirements and direction for the initiative and to gain early access to draft specifications before public release.  The OpenKODE Working Group will commence work during January 2006.  More details about joining Khronos may be found at http://www.khronos.org/members/.

Advanced media applications, including 3D games, are driving enhanced revenue for the mobile industry by raising the value of advanced handsets, enabling higher games revenue and driving network data service usage.  However, the rollout of compelling applications is being held back by disruptive platform variability, forcing software developers to create many different variants of each application, raising costs, and slowing the widespread availability of advanced content.  OpenKODE will bring together the family of Khronos Media Application Programming Interfaces (APIs): OpenGL® ES for 3D graphics, OpenMAX™ for streaming media, OpenVG™ for vector 2D graphics and OpenSL ES™ for audio; and will define a new user-input API and potentially add new APIs for access to functionality such as multi-player networking and operating system resources to create a complete, coherently designed, reliably available platform that can be implemented across a wide variety of mobile and embedded devices.

OpenKODE will provide a C-based development environment familiar to many games developers working on PC and console platforms, encouraging cross-platform porting and reducing learning curve for many developers new to the mobile market.  OpenKODE will also complement Java-based platforms by enabling the rapid development of C-based libraries, gaming engines and applications that can be invoked from Java applications.

“OpenKODE marks the maturing of the Khronos Group’s work from a collection of related APIs, into a complete and coherent development environment designed to provide all the functionality needed by game developers to create fully portable, high-performance mobile applications,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA.  “Khronos strongly encourages all members of the mobile industry, particularly software developers and carriers, to become Khronos members to help ensure this initiative meets their technical and business requirements.”

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as COLLADA™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™ and OpenML™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of 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 media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Members Endorse 
New OpenGL ES Benchmark from Futuremark

Developers and press are invited to first public demonstration of 3DMarkMobile06 at two free mobile technology forums on November 10 and 11, 2005 at GSTAR/KDC2005

November 8, 2005 – Korea Game Conference - Seoul, Korea: The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that Futuremark® Corporation, a long-standing Khronos Contributing Member is now shipping 3DMarkMobile06, a demanding OpenGL ES-based graphics performance benchmark for companies developing 3D mobile-device hardware.  3DMarkMobile06 is the first benchmark designed specifically to benchmark next generation OpenGL ES 1.0 and OpenGL ES 1.1 hardware accelerated mobile handsets and is developed in cooperation with members of Futuremark’s Handheld Benchmark Developer Program (BDP) members; including ARM, ATI, Bitboys, DMP, Falanx, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Khronos Group, NVIDIA and Symbian.  Futuremark experts will deliver in-depth technology lectures on 3DMarkMobile06 Developer’s Edition at the GSTAR/Korea Game Developer Conference in Seoul, Korea on Friday November 11, 2005 from 10:30AM to 12:30PM, in Room #206 of the KINTEX Convention Center at the Korea International Exhibition Center and at the Khronos Developer University on November 10th at the same location – starting at 12 noon.  Both sessions are completely free for attendees - please register to ensure your seat at: http://www.khronos.org/devu/register.html

3DMarkMobile06 Developers’ Edition is now available via source-code licensing to Futuremark’s BDP members. Compiled versions are available immediately for Windows (i386)*, Windows CE (ARM) and Symbian (ARM) platforms. Compilations for other platforms will be delivered upon orderCompiled versions are available, on request, to media and others. Futuremark is offering binary versions of the benchmark for Windows (i386), Windows CE (ARM) and Symbian (ARM) platforms, and the binaries are built using the latest, publicly available SDKs for each platform. An end-user friendly consumer version of 3DMarkMobile06 is expected to be launched later next year to enable consumers to conduct their own benchmarking of handsets with hardware accelerated 3D graphics.

“Effective benchmarking tools are an essential piece of the mobile 3D graphics ecosystem and the need to benchmark OpenGL ES hardware performance is very well met with Futuremark’s release of 3DMarkMobile06,” said Neil Trevett, president of Khronos. “This state-of-the-art application-level benchmark delivers a variety of performance tests that are perfect for measuring the next generation of mobile 3D hardware using OpenGL ES and will greatly assist the industry deliver 3D-enabled handhelds that are fast, powerful, efficient and can handle the demands of next-generation rich media applications.”

“Futuremark has been at the leading edge of graphics’ benchmarking since 1998, and is looked upon as the primary qualifier for graphics performance on various platforms,” said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of the Tiburon CA based market research firm Jon Peddie Research. “Futuremark is bringing this experience to the handheld platform and specifically to test the new processors that will accelerate OpenGL ES 1.0 and 1.1. 3DMarkMobile06 paves the ground for follow-up products from Futuremark targeting OpenGL ES 2.0. Ultimately, this will help the industry deliver 3D performance and shaders to the handheld market that will enable amazing life like applications, rivaling game consoles.”

“Futuremark benefits our clients by providing credible performance numbers in real life applications, and allows us to develop competitive graphics IP” said Tatsuo Yamamoto, President and CEO, DMP Inc. based in Tokyo Japan. “3DMarkMobile06 is very useful determining performance and compatibility related issues in early stage development. We are very pleased to be part of Futuremark’s licensing program.”

“3D graphics and multimedia content demand rapid advancements in mobile technology and so does the need for a performance measurement and rating system,” said Glenn Schuster, director of partner programs for the mobile GPU business at NVIDIA. “Futuremark has been a leader in the field in 3D graphics benchmarking for years, and we look forward to having a comprehensive tool to help ensure a compelling and enjoyable experience is delivered to mobile consumers.” 

“Symbian is working with the industry to enable mobile handset manufacturers to use the latest graphics acceleration technology,” said Bill Pinnell, Product Manager Multimedia, Gaming and Graphics, Symbian. “Futuremark’s 3DMarkMobile06 is the first standards based benchmark available to enable the whole industry to evaluate the performance of new hardware with real-world content.”
About Futuremark® Corporation
Futuremark Corporation is the leading provider of performance analysis software and services for PCs and smartphones. Futuremark is known around the world for its benchmark products, including the 3DMark® and PCMark® Series and SPMark™ - with more than 30 million copies distributed worldwide - and value-added services powered by a database of over 12 million real life benchmarking results. Futuremark® maintains offices in Saratoga, California and Helsinki, Finland. For more information, please visit http://www.futuremark.com.

About Khronos

The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as COLLADA™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™ and OpenML™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of 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 media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Continues Expansion of Membership and Developer Education in Asia Pacific Region; Creative Technology Ltd Becomes Khrono

Khronos hosting Educational Developer Sessions in Seoul including speakers from Samsung and SK Telecom; audio really takes hold

October 24, 2005 – Clearlake Park, California: The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that Creative Technology Ltd has become a Khronos Promoting Member, gaining a seat on the Board of Directors that direct Khronos activities. Khronos is also happy to announce that Emersys and _________ have become Khronos Contributing Members to participate in the ongoing development and promotion of open, royalty-free, embedded media acceleration API standards to enable dynamic media hardware and software markets on a wide variety of platforms. 

Khronos Contributing Member Siemens has transferred its membership to BenQ Corporation.

Khronos Group at the China International Mobile Communication Forum on November 2-4, 2005:
Developers and press are invited to attend a press conference that will feature discussion of the Khronos Group APIs by Member companies Fathammer, MTIS, NVIDIA and Sonaptic. The event is free of charge and will be held 14:00 – 17:00 Wednesday, November 2, 2005. 
Additionally, Khronos Group are SILVER Sponsors of the China International Mobile Communication Forum on November 3rd and 4th.  Attendees of the show are invited to visit the Khronos Group Booth #1 to see Member demos featuring Hybrid Graphics, MTIS, Smedia and Fathammer developer partners Greatelsof and Socogame.  All events will take place at the Shanghai Purple Mountain Hotel 778, Dongfang Road, Pudong, Shanghai 200122. For location information: http://www.pmhotel.com.cn/

Khronos Group Press Conference G* in Seoul on November 10, 2005:
Khronos is also pleased to host a “Khronos DevU” educational session at G* in Seoul. Come to hear about the latest developments in media acceleration and mobile graphics APIs, including more about the new Khronos COLLADA working group.  In addition, this conference will feature information on new Futuremark benchmark programs, and up to the minute news on OpenGL ES 2.0, 1.2, and more.  Join us at the Convention Press Room 6B upstairs at the Austin Convention Center, Thursday October 27 from 1:00-1:30pm.  For more information on the location: http://www.gstar.or.kr/eng/main.asp

Need New Quote from Neil “We warmly welcome our most recent members from a diverse cross-section of the embedded media food-chain; strengthening Khronos’ ability to create embedded media APIs that have the full support of the industry and genuinely represent the needs of a broad range of markets,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA.  “Khronos will continue to evolve and adapt to ensure that our growing membership translates into increased momentum; enabling us to continue to provide timely media acceleration APIs for the fast-moving embedded industry.”

Need Quote from Futuremark - Tero

Emersys

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BenQ Corporation is an industry leader in wireless communication devices serving markets in more than 70 countries around the world. BenQ Corporation acquired Siemens’ mobile phone business unit and set the foundation to become one of the world’s leading players in the mobile phone industry. BenQ Product lines include MP3 players, 3G mobile phones, digital displays and peripherals.  http://www.benq.com

Creative Technology Ltd is a worldwide leader in digital entertainment products for PC users. Famous for its Sound Blaster sound cards, Creative is now driving digital entertainment on the PC platform with products like the Zen and MuVo MP3 players. Creative’s innovative hardware, proprietary technology, applications and services leverage the Internet, enabling consumers to experience high-quality digital entertainment—anytime, anywhere. 3Dlabs, a wholly owned subsidiary of Creative Technology Ltd., is a leading innovator in professional visual processing and supplies a broad range of graphics accelerators to Computer Aided Design, Digital Content Creation, and visual simulation professionals. Its Wildcat graphics solutions are available in OEM workstations, through an international distributor/reseller network, and directly to end-users at 3Dlabs’ online store. http://us.creative.com or http://www.3dlabs.com.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as COLLADA, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL™ ES and OpenML™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of 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 media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Creative Technology Ltd Becomes Khronos Promoting Member, Emersys joins - “audio API starts off strong!”

Khronos hosting Press Conference in Shanghai November 2, 2005 including speakers from NVIDIA, Fathammer, Emersys, MTIS and ___-;

October 24, 2005 – Clearlake Park, California: The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that Creative Technology Ltd has become a Khronos Promoting Member, gaining a seat on the Board of Directors that direct Khronos activities. Khronos is also happy to announce that Emersys has become a Khronos Contributing Member to participate in the ongoing development and promotion of open, royalty-free, embedded media acceleration API standards to enable dynamic media hardware and software markets on a wide variety of platforms. 

—Khronos Contributing Member Siemens has transferred its membership to BenQ Corporation.

Khronos Group at the China International Mobile Communication Forum on November 2-4, 2005:
Developers and press are invited to attend a press conference that will feature discussion of the Khronos Group APIs by Member companies Fathammer, MTIS, NVIDIA and Sonaptic. The event is free of charge and will be held 14:00 – 17:00 Wednesday, November 2, 2005. 
Additionally, Khronos Group are SILVER Sponsors of the China International Mobile Communication Forum on November 3rd and 4th.  Attendees of the show are invited to visit the Khronos Group Booth #1 to see Member demos featuring Hybrid Graphics, MTIS, Smedia and Fathammer developer partners Greatelsof and Socogame.  All events will take place at the Shanghai Purple Mountain Hotel 778, Dongfang Road, Pudong, Shanghai 200122. For location information: http://www.pmhotel.com.cn/

Need New Quote from Neil “We warmly welcome our most recent members from a diverse cross-section of the embedded media food-chain; strengthening Khronos’ ability to create embedded media APIs that have the full support of the industry and genuinely represent the needs of a broad range of markets,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA.  “Khronos will continue to evolve and adapt to ensure that our growing membership translates into increased momentum; enabling us to continue to provide timely media acceleration APIs for the fast-moving embedded industry.”

Emersys
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BenQ Corporation is an industry leader in wireless communication devices serving markets in more than 70 countries around the world. BenQ Corporation acquired Siemens’ mobile phone business unit and set the foundation to become one of the world’s leading players in the mobile phone industry. BenQ Product lines include MP3 players, 3G mobile phones, digital displays and peripherals.  http://www.benq.com

Creative Technology Ltd is a worldwide leader in digital entertainment products for PC users. Famous for its Sound Blaster sound cards, Creative is now driving digital entertainment on the PC platform with products like the Zen and MuVo MP3 players. Creative’s innovative hardware, proprietary technology, applications and services leverage the Internet, enabling consumers to experience high-quality digital entertainment—anytime, anywhere. 3Dlabs, a wholly owned subsidiary of Creative Technology Ltd., is a leading innovator in professional visual processing and supplies a broad range of graphics accelerators to Computer Aided Design, Digital Content Creation, and visual simulation professionals. Its Wildcat graphics solutions are available in OEM workstations, through an international distributor/reseller network, and directly to end-users at 3Dlabs’ online store. http://us.creative.com or http://www.3dlabs.com.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as COLLADA, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL™ ES and OpenML™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of 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 media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Major ARM News, Major FM new benchmark news - Khronos Group Grows to Over 95 Members: Creative, Tat, Reincomm, BenQ

Developers and press are invited to meet members at a free all-day 
Khronos Media API technology forum on October 26, 2005 in Austin as part of the Austin Game Conference

October 23, 2005 – Clearlake Park, California: The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that Reigncom Ltd and TAT have become Khronos Contributing Members to participate in the ongoing development and promotion of open, royalty-free, embedded media acceleration API standards to enable dynamic media hardware and software markets on a wide variety of platforms. 

Collada 1.4 and Futuremark 3DMarkMobile06 Developer’s Edition product News???

Press and Developers Invited to Attend Khronos Activities at Austin Game Conference.

DevU Event October 26th, 2005: Khronos member media experts will deliver in-depth technology lectures on Khronos APIs on Wednesday October 26, 2005 from 9:00 am to 5:00 PM, in rooms #2 and #3 of the Austin Convention Center at 500 East Cesar Chavez Street in Austin.  The Khronos DevU sessions are completely free, and do not require a conference badge.  Please do register ahead of time at http://www.khronos.org/devu/register.html.  Full descriptions of session content are available at: http://www.khronos.org/devu/locations/austin2005.html.  Speakers will include: Dr. Jon Peddie of TechWatch; and representatives from Khronos Member companies ATI, Bitboys, Falanx Microsystems, Freescale Semiconductor, Futuremark, Hybrid Graphics, Imagination Technologies, Nokia, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Sony, Texas Instruments and more.  (Khronos member Futuremark will feature an in-depth session on Graphics Engine programming with OpenGL ES.  This presentation will give an overview how to create a graphics engine together with a content path suitable for games and game like applications using the OpenGL ES API. This presentation discusses Futuremark’s mobile OpenGL ES engine, giving details about specific problems and solutions.)

Khronos Group Press Conference October 27th, 2005: Come to hear about the latest developments in media acceleration and mobile graphics APIs, including more about the new Khronos COLLADA working group.  In addition, this conference will feature information on new Futuremark benchmark programs, and up to the minute news on OpenGL ES 2.0, 1.2, and more.  Join us at the Convention Press Room 6B
upstairs at the Austin Convention Center, Thursday October 27 from 1:00-1:30pm.  For a map of the location: http://www.gameconference.com/maps.html

Need New Quote from Neil “We warmly welcome our most recent members from a diverse cross-section of the embedded media food-chain; strengthening Khronos’ ability to create embedded media APIs that have the full support of the industry and genuinely represent the needs of a broad range of markets,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA.  “Khronos will continue to evolve and adapt to ensure that our growing membership translates into increased momentum; enabling us to continue to provide timely media acceleration APIs for the fast-moving embedded industry.”

Need Quote from Futuremark - Tero

Need Quote from Creative “Creative is now a Promoter, to further widen and support the company’s long standing commitment to the group.”  Hock Leow (Creative CTO, 3Dlabs President) will be able to provide the quote per Nathan Charles.

ReignCom Ltd developer of innovative digital convergence products, came up with the world’s first Multi-CODEC CD Player in December 2000. Their business lines include portable digital content players and automotive information and entertainment systems. ReignCom is known as a global leader in the MP3 player market with the iriver brand. http://reigncom.com/eng/en_default.asp

TAT provides software and graphics technologies and services to help portable device manufacturers to differentiate and enhance the graphical user interface. TAT’s Kastor technology for user interfaces offers real-time layer compositing and animation. The elements of the user interface are treated as layers that are composed together to produce the final image. Windows, images, video sources and other user interface components, may be composed in real-time with effects such as transparency, drop-shadow and with advanced animation techniques. The composition layers support per-pixel transparency, opacity and transformations. http://www.tat.se

BenQ Corporation is an industry leader in wireless communication devices serving markets in more than 70 countries around the world. BenQ Corporation acquired Siemens’ mobile phone business unit and set the foundation to become one of the world’s leading players in the mobile phone industry. BenQ Product lines include MP3 players, 3G mobile phones, digital displays and peripherals.  http://www.benq.com

Creative Technology Ltd is a worldwide leader in digital entertainment products for PC users. Famous for its Sound Blaster sound cards, Creative is now driving digital entertainment on the PC platform with products like the Zen and MuVo MP3 players. Creative’s innovative hardware, proprietary technology, applications and services leverage the Internet, enabling consumers to experience high-quality digital entertainment—anytime, anywhere. 3Dlabs, a wholly owned subsidiary of Creative Technology Ltd., is a leading innovator in professional visual processing and supplies a broad range of graphics accelerators to Computer Aided Design, Digital Content Creation, and visual simulation professionals. Its Wildcat graphics solutions are available in OEM workstations, through an international distributor/reseller network, and directly to end-users at 3Dlabs’ online store. http://us.creative.com or http://www.3dlabs.com.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as COLLADA, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL™ ES and OpenML™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of 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 media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

OpenGL ES Safety Critical API Gains Momentum as 
Diehl Avionik and Zandiant Technologies Join Khronos

OpenGL ES demonstrations at the Princess Interactive User Conference in Germany

September 19, 2005 – Clearlake Park, California– The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that major avionic supplier Diehl Avionik Systeme and Zandiant Technologies, a leading supplier in automotive navigation and telematics systems have become Khronos Contributing Members.  Also announced today, visual simulation and virtual prototyping specialist Princess Interactive has become an OpenGL® ES Adopter in order to port to their INSIDES V4.0 virtual prototyping/virtual cockpit system. The INSIDES V4beta and several other Khronos Member product demonstrations will be presented at the Princess Interactive User Conference (PITECH 2005) in Germany later this month.

This news follows the announcement last month that Khronos released the first publicly available version of the Safety Critical Profile for OpenGL ES. OpenGL ES-SC 1.0 removes functionality from OpenGL ES 1.0 that is not required for safety-critical applications such automotive and avionics instrumentation displays, in order to minimize implementation and safety certification costs. OpenGL ES-SC 1.0 also adds functionality, such as display lists, that are required to support legacy and auto-generated display applications in this specialized market segment.  Rapidly-emerging markets that require OpenGL ES-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.  Details about the specification are available at http://www.khronos.org/opengles/sc/.

“The defense and aerospace industry has traditionally relied on proprietary subset definitions of OpenGL, but manufacturers are now demanding open standard solutions to reduce development costs and shorten product development times,”  said Mr. Christian Below, vice president of Marketing and Business Development, Diehl Avionik Systeme GmbH. “By joining the Khronos Group and contributing to the specification, Diehl will help enable rapid and cost-effective development, deployment and maintenance of safety-critical systems.”

“After the hard work put into OpenGL ES-SC by all of the working group members over the past three years, it is wonderful to witness the incredible response that we have had since its formal release at Siggraph this year,” said Bruce Stockwell, senior OpenGL developer at Seaweed Systems and chair of the OpenGL ES Safety Critical working group. “We are excited to welcome new members and adopters in key markets such as aerospace, defense and automotive. We invite interested parties to come to PITECH to see demonstrations of real applications running under an OpenGL ES-SC compliant implementation.”

“Earlier in 2005 Diehl Avionik selected ALT’s DO-178B Level A certifiable OpenGL ES driver to be deployed in new aircraft cockpit display systems, and Freescale selected ALT’s OpenGL ES driver and GT3D Development Kit as the solution to support their 2D/3D graphic requirements in automotive/telematics display systems,” said Chris Brady, CEO of ALT Software. “ALT encourages all companies in automotive and avionics graphics design to get involved with the Khronos Group and help ensure that the OpenGL ES-SC continues to foster more rapid development and deployment of cutting-edge telematics solutions.”

“Quantum3D’s IData Human Machine Interface (HMI) development suite offers tool-based, cross-platform solutions for OpenGL ES platforms, from low cost devices through safety-critical DO-178B avionics, said Ross Smith, Quantum3D president and co-founder.  “IData with its optional 3D scene management and digital map modules is the natural choice for the next-generation of advanced HMI applications for first responders, military, medical, automotive, and industrial automation HMIs”.  Quantum3D is committed to supporting OpenGL ES and the Safety Critical profile to further these key industry technologies.”

Khronos Presentations & Demos at Princess Interactive User Conference
Khronos members 3Dlabs, ALT Software, Fraunhofer, NVIDIA, Quantum3D, Siemens and Seaweed Systems will demonstrate cutting-edge OpenGL ES based products at the Princess Interactive User Conference in Madgeburg, Germany, September 29 and 30th.  More information: http://www.khronos.org/news/events/#princessinteractive

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as COLLADA™, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™ and OpenML™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of 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 media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Group Releases OpenVG 1.0 Specification for Accelerated 2D Vector Graphics

Open, royalty-free, cross-platform API enables hardware acceleration
for vector graphics libraries such as SVG and Flash – an industry first

1st August, 2005 – SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles, California – The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that it has ratified and publicly released the OpenVG™ 1.0 royalty-free, open standard for low-level 2D vector graphics.  OpenVG enables hardware acceleration of libraries such as such as Flash and SVG, enabling high-quality, anti-aliased, scalable 2D vector graphics on embedded and handheld devices with highly interactive performance and low levels of power consumption.  Developed by Khronos members including 3Dlabs, ATI, Bitboys, BitFlash, DMP, Ericsson, Falanx, Hybrid Graphics, Ikivo, Imagination Technologies, Nokia, NVIDIA, Motorola, PalmSource, Symbian and Sun Microsystems; the OpenVG standard has been designed to seamlessly interoperate with OpenGL® ES 3D graphics; - creating a high-performance, fully integrated 2D and 3D embedded graphics acceleration environment.  The OpenVG API specification is available for free download at http://www.khronos.org/openvg/http://www.khronos.org/openvg/spec.html.

Handheld devices have an urgent need for the smooth and fluidly scalable 2D that high-quality vector graphics can provide to create high-quality user interfaces, new-generation mapping and GPS displays, compelling 2D games and ultra-readable text on small displays.  SVG Tiny, SVG Basic and Flash Mobile are designed for mobile devices, and OpenVG accelerates these by defining a low-level hardware acceleration layer that will enable graphics silicon to provide great performance for these packages at very low power-levels.  OpenVG 1.0 was defined in only twelve months using the established Khronos Working Group process, and Khronos expects to update the OpenVG specification annually in order to track and enable the rapid developments of graphics capabilities in handheld and embedded devices.

“The OpenVG Working Group has created a solid specification with broad industry support from scratch in just twelve months; again –  showing the efficiency and effectiveness of the Khronos specification process,” said Koichi Mori, chairman of OpenVG working group, and senior research engineer at Nokia.  “OpenVG 1.0 will fills an immediate real need in the embedded graphics market:  a – widespread, inexpensive hardware-accelerated 2D vector graphics that will can catalyze the development and deployment of ubiquitous high-quality 2D applications and interfaces.”

“Future mobile phone user interfaces will primarily use vector graphics. Bitboys has been providing mobile vector graphics hardware since 2002 – the introduction of the OpenVG API allows us to provide a standard interface for all our graphics processors,” said Petri Nordlund, CTO of Bitboys.

Khronos will release details of an OpenVG 1.0 Adopter’s Program in the second half of 2005, including a Conformance Testing Program enabling conformant products to use the OpenVG trademark ensuring that conformant OpenVG implementations provide a reliable, cross-platform 2D graphics programming platform.  Additionally, a reference OpenVG implementation for Windows, coded by Hybrid Graphics, will be freely available within the next month to anyone wishing to experiment with OpenVG functionality.

“Hybrid sees OpenVG as a crucial graphics technology for mobile phones and other embedded devices,” says Ville Miettinen, CTO of Hybrid Graphics. “Hybrid is a leading provider of mobile graphics technology, and we already see a strong demand in the market for a low-level 2D vector graphics standard. Hybrid’s reference implementation will soon be available - see http://www.hybrid.fi/main/openvg/index.php for more information.”

The latest version of the EGL library for interfacing with and controlling platform, memory and buffer resources – EGL 1.2 – has been extended to enable seamless rendering using both OpenGL ES and OpenVG™ enabling high-performance, accelerated, mixed-mode 2D and 3D rendering.  Now that OpenVG 1.0 is publicly released, Khronos will include OpenVG educational lectures in the worldwide Khronos Developer University series to teach developers how to use OpenVG and the advantages of scalable vector graphics – for more information see http://www.khronos.org/devu/http://www.khronos.org/devu/locations.html.

Presentations at SIGGRAPH 2005

OpenGL VG: “Birds of a Feather” Meeting
Tuesday August 2nd, 4-6pm.  Manhattan C, Sheraton Downtown 711 S Hope St, Los Angeles. 
More information at: http://www.khronos.org/news/events/.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as COLLADA™, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX™, OpenML™, OpenVG, OpenMAX™ and OpenSL™ ES™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of 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 media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as COLLADA™, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX™, OpenML™ and OpenVG, and OpenSL ES™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of 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 media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

 

Khronos Releases OpenGL ES 2.0 Specification Bringing Streamlined Shader Programming to Embedded Graphics

On-time delivery of four OpenGL ES specifications also provide enhanced 3D in fixed function hardware and safety critical markets

August 1st, 2005 – SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles, California – The Khronos™ Group announced today that it has unanimously ratified and publicly released the OpenGL® ES 2.0, OpenGL ES 1.1 Extension Pack, EGL™ 1.2 and OpenGL ES-SC 1.0 specifications; meeting the Khronos Group’s commitment to provide updates to the industry-leading application programming interface (API) for embedded 3D graphics every 12 months.  The OpenGL ES standard is royalty-free and defines subset profiles of OpenGL® to enable small-footprint embedded applications with advanced graphics capabilities and has been widely adopted by the wireless and gaming industries.  All the OpenGL ES-related specifications are available for free download at http://www.khronos.org/opengles/.

The OpenGL ES 2.0 specification has been developed by the graphics industry leaders that are members of Khronos in close collaboration with the OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB); the governing body for desktop OpenGL.  OpenGL ES 2.0 combines a version of the OpenGL Shading Language for programming vertex and fragment shaders that has been adapted for embedded platforms, together with a streamlined API from OpenGL ES 1.1 that has removed any fixed functionality that can be easily replaced by shader programs, to minimize the cost and power of advanced programmable graphics subsystems. The released specification is provisional, as Khronos will fine-tune the specification as the industry gains implementation experience of embedded programmable graphics over the next six months, and silicon vendors are enabled to immediately start processor designs.

The OpenGL ES 1.1 Extension Pack collects together a number of optional extensions in one specification to extend OpenGL ES functionality for fixed function hardware.  The Extension Pack also raises the baseline for visual configurations to reduce the number of variations that ISVs need to support – making porting OpenGL ES of applications across multiple platforms both easier and faster.  Industry feedback from OpenGL ES 1.1 and the Extension Pack will be incorporated into future versions of OpenGL 1.X for fixed function hardware. 

The latest version of the EGL library for interfacing with and controlling platform, memory and buffer resources – EGL 1.2 – has been extended to enable seamless rendering using both OpenGL ES and OpenVG™ - the new 2D vector graphics standards also announced by Khronos today - enabling high-performance, accelerated, mixed-mode 2D and 3D rendering.

“OpenGL ES 2.0 is a state-of-the-art programmable graphics API that reflects the experience and expertise of the world’s leading graphics companies that have designed it.  Not only does it encapsulate the very latest graphics technology for embedded markets – it is free for the industry to use,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, chairman of the OpenGL ES Working Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA.  “The OpenGL ES Working Group is carefully balancing the introduction of leading-edge technology with the commercial needs of the industry.  OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenGL ES 1.1 Extension Pack will enable silicon design pipelines to be kept full – while not disrupting the market introduction of products using OpenGL ES 1.1 today.”

Khronos expects to update the OpenGL ES Adopter’s Program to provide conformance tests for OpenGL ES 2.0 within six months, enabling interested companies to gain access to source code for Conformance Tests and to use the OpenGL ES trademark on products that pass the defined testing procedure.  This ensures that conformant OpenGL ES implementations provide a reliable, cross-platform graphics programming platform.

“The OpenGL ES 2.0 API enables floating-point programmability on next-generation handheld devices and our Bitboys G40 hardware graphics processor fully supports the new API,” said Petri Nordlund, CTO of Bitboys. “The combination is a perfect engine for amazing next-generation mobile graphics.”

“OpenGL ES 2.0 marks a major shift in the mobile industry, allowing handheld graphics to mirror the visual effects of desktops today,” said Borgar Ljosland, CEO Falanx Microsystems. “Game developers and content creators will now have the ultimate freedom to develop to a truly multi-platform API – from mobile, to desktop, to game console, and our Mali200™ IP core will be there every step of the way.”

“With full support for the OpenGL ES 2.0 API and OpenGL 2.0 shaders, the highly programmable and scalable PowerVR SGX family presents a feature set capable of bringing very advanced content into the mobile space,” said Martin Ashton, general manager (PowerVR), Imagination Technologies.  “PowerVR is already the most widely adopted advanced 3D graphics processing technology for the mobile market and by advancing our feature set alongside that of OpenGL ES we’ll ensure that semiconductor and handset manufacturers have a compelling roadmap that will be able to capture the imagination of both content developers and end-users.”

Additionally, Khronos has announced today the release of the first version of the Safety Critical Profile for OpenGL ES.  OpenGL ES-SC 1.0 removes functionality from OpenGL ES 1.0 that is not required for safety-critical applications such as avionics and automotive instrumentation displays to minimize implementation and safety certification costs.  OpenGL ES–SC 1.0 also adds functionality, such as display lists, that are required to support legacy and auto-generated display applications in this specialized market segment.

“OpenGL ES-SC 1.0 enables the safety-critical graphics community to make use of an open standard API that is specifically aimed at satisfying the needs of their market. Any company that plans to address safety in their graphics design should get involved with Khronos to ensure that their future needs continue to be met as OpenGL ES-SC evolves,” said Robert Schulman, president, Seaweed Systems. “From Seaweed’s perspective, our commitment to OpenGL ES-SC is completely in line with our business focus as it protects our customers’ application investment and our SeaWind/178 product fully implements this important new standard.”

Presentations at SIGGRAPH 2005

OpenGL ES: “Birds of a Feather” Meeting
Tuesday August 2nd, 2-4pm.  Manhattan C, Sheraton Downtown 711 S Hope St, Los Angeles.  More information at: http://www.khronos.org/news/events/.

Developing Mobile 3D Applications with OpenGL ES and M3G: Taught by Khronos Members
August 2nd, 1:45 - 5:30 pm - LACC - Room 502A.  Level: Intermediate.  This course presents two new 3D graphics APIs for mobile platforms: OpenGL ES and M3G.  For more information, please visit: http://www.siggraph.org/s2005/main.php?f=conference&p=courses&s=35&PHPSESSID=aab6a7354db62e66c6793835716a5ceb.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as COLLADA™, OpenGL ES, OpenML™, OpenVG, and OpenSL™ ES and OpenMAX™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of 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 media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Announces New OpenSL ES Initiative for Low-level, Cross-platform Sound and Audio Acceleration

Beatnik, Creative Labs, NVIDIA, QSound Labs and Sonaptic join as founders of the 
new sound and audio working group; Open call for industry participation

1st August, 2005 – SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles, California – The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce the formation of the new OpenSL™ ES (Open Sound Library for Embedded Systems) working group to define an open, royalty-free, cross-platform API (application programming interface) standard to enable low-level audio hardware acceleration across multiple embedded devices and platforms.  OpenSL ES was initiated by Creative Labs and already has strong initial support from audio industry leaders including Beatnik, NVIDIA, QSound Labs and Sonaptic.  OpenSL ES will be developed under the proven Khronos participation framework and Khronos invites any interested company to join and participate in the development of OpenSL ES and other Khronos standards, more information at: http://www.khronos.org/members/ and http://www.khronos.org/opensles/.

The goal of OpenSL ES is to define an application-oriented audio API tuned for embedded systems, standardizing access to hardware acceleration features such as 3D positional audio and MIDI playback. OpenSL ES will provide a fully cross-platform foundation for a wide range of higher-level audio APIs, including JSR-234, and will enable easy porting of game and applications of across multiple platforms and audio devices. OpenSL ES is at an abstraction level similar to OpenGL® ES for 3D graphics and will complement the system-oriented audio component of OpenMAX IL, another Khronos Group API currently under development.

“Creative has always been at the forefront of audio API development on the PC platform and has long recognized the importance of open APIs for developers,” said Dr. Nathan Charles, OpenSL ES acting working group chair and senior software engineer at Creative Labs, Inc.  “OpenSL ES will provide a cross-platform foundation to rationalize the wide-ranging variety of closed audio development libraries in embedded markets, providing developers and hardware vendors a stable standard to build the market for audio applications and accelerators.”

“Beatnik welcomes the opportunity to participate in bringing the benefits of an open standard audio API to the mobile application and handset manufacturing community,” said Jeremy Copp, chief sales officer at Beatnik, Inc. “Continuing our commitment to defining and supporting new standards in audio technology means that, as well as being able to utilize standard content formats, applications will soon use a common interface across a wide range of devices to access real time audio generation services.”

“We are looking forward to participating in the new OpenSL ES working group and contributing to the goal of seamless playback across multiple hardware devices,” stated David Gallagher, president of QSound Labs, Inc. “Our previous experiences and contributions to audio APIs in both the PC and mobile industries made the decision to participate in developing an open standard a simple and logical one.”

“Sonaptic firmly believes that enhanced audio will help bring the mobile gaming experience to a new level; and we recognize that to deliver great audio performance, software developers need an open, royalty-free API that enables cross-platform, high-performance, 3D positional audio,” said David Monteith, managing director at Sonaptic.  “As a leading supplier of Hi-Fi Audio Solutions for the mobile device market, Sonaptic is delighted to become a member of the Khronos Group and participate in the successful development of OpenSL ES within Khronos.” 

“OpenSL ES will enable Khronos to include sound and audio functionality in its integrated family of media APIs for embedded markets,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA.  “Sound is a vital ingredient in compelling handheld gameplay and this low-level open standard will enable a new-level of innovation among silicon vendors to ship great audio on millions of devices.”

Presentations at SIGGRAPH 2005

OpenGL ES: “Birds of a Feather” Meeting
Tuesday August 2nd, 2-4pm.  Manhattan C, Sheraton Downtown 711 S Hope St, Los Angeles. 
More information at: http://www.khronos.org/news/events/.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as COLLADA™, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL™ ES and OpenML™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of 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 media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

SONY and NVIDIA Become Khronos Promoting Members

Khronos Group strengthens key industry representation to ensure Khronos media standards continue to evolve to meet the needs of embedded markets

1st August, 2005 – SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles, California – The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that NVIDIA and Sony Computer Electronic Inc. (SCEI) have become Khronos Promoting Members, gaining a seat on the fifteen-strong Board of Directors that direct Khronos activities. Khronos is also happy to announce that CoreLogic, GiQuila, Nextreaming and Sasken Communication Technologies have become Khronos Contributing Members to participate in the ongoing development of open, royalty-free embedded media API standards.  Also announced today, Harman/Becker has become a Khronos Adopter for OpenGL® ES 1.0, which enables them to test their products for conformance with the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification and use the OpenGL ES logo in the automotive market. 

Founded in 2000, the Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as COLLADA™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenML™, OpenVG™ and OpenSL™ ES™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of 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 media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

NVIDIA plays a leadership role in Khronos and is actively promoting numerous Khronos API standards including OpenGL ES, OpenVG, OpenMAX, COLLADA and OpenSL ES.  NVIDIA’s GoForce family of wireless media processors use the Khronos APIs to deliver a high-performance, visually rich multimedia experience on mobile phones and handheld devices combined with low power consumption and long battery life.

“NVIDIA believes strongly in the power of open standards to create market opportunities and the embedded and handheld industries are today’s high growth markets that are demanding advanced media capabilities,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, chairman of the OpenGL ES Working Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA.  “NVIDIA’s Promoter membership will enable us to continue to initiate and influence key Khronos initiatives that are creating significant business opportunities for both NVIDIA and the industry.”

SCEI has elected to become a Khronos Promoter to further their leadership role in creating open standards under Khronos’ open participation process and royalty-free intellectual property (IP) framework – including the COLLADA™ project that was initiated by SCEI to enable 3D authoring applications to freely exchange digital assets without loss of information.

“COLLADA has already made great progress with strong industry support – and now the time has come to formalize our standardization process by joining Khronos to ensure that any company can participate in its development and to ensure the standard will always be freely available,” said Masa Chatani, Corporate Executive and CTO at SCEI.  “SCEI remains fully committed to COLLADA: it forms a key part of the PLAYSTATION3 tools strategy.  SCEI has become a Khronos Promoter so that we can fully support COLLADA, OpenGL® ES and other Khronos standards.”

Khronos Presentations at SIGGRAPH 2005

COLLADA: An open Digital Asset Exchange Schema for the Interactive 3D Industry
Wednesday August 3rd, 1-3pm. Hall J, Room 1.  More information at: http://www.siggraph.org/s2005/main.php?f=conference&p=exhibitor&s=index

OpenGL ES: “Birds of a Feather” Meeting
Tuesday August 2nd, 2-4pm.  Manhattan C, Sheraton Downtown 711 S Hope St, Los Angeles.  More information at: http://www.khronos.org/news/events/.
OpenGL ES: “Birds of a Feather” Meeting for press and developers.
Tuesday August 2nd, 2-4pm.  Manhattan C, Sheraton Downtown. More information at: http://www.khronos.org/news/events/.

Developing Mobile 3D Applications with OpenGL ES and M3G: Taught by Khronos Members
Tuesday August 2nd, 1:45 - 5:30 pm.  LACC - Room 502A.  Level: Intermediate.  This course presents two new 3D graphics APIs for mobile platforms: OpenGL ES and M3G.  For more information, please visit: http://www.siggraph.org/s2005/main.php?f=conference&p=courses&s=35&PHPSESSID=aab6a7354db62e66c6793835716a5ceb.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as COLLADA, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL™ ES and OpenML™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of 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 media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

COLLADA Joins Khronos Group to Create 
3D Authoring Open Standard

Project initiated by Sony Computer Entertainment for PLAYSTATION®3 is now open for participation by all Khronos members; 
Encourages strong tool chain for all OpenGL ES platforms

1st August, 2005 – SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles, California – The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that the COLLADA™ project has elected to join Khronos to further their work as an open standard under Khronos’ open participation process and royalty-free intellectual property (IP) framework.  Initiated by Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) COLLADA stands for “COLLAborative Design Activity” and defines an XML-based schema to enable 3D authoring applications to freely exchange digital assets without loss of information – enabling multiple software packages to be combined into extremely powerful tool chains. Numerous companies have supported and developed COLLADA including 3Dlabs, Alias, Aegia, Autodesk, ATI, Havok, NVIDIA and Softimage.

“COLLADA has already made great progress with strong industry support – and now the time has come to formalize our standardization process by joining Khronos to ensure that any company can participate in its development and to ensure the standard will always be freely available,” said Masa Chatani, Corporate Executive and CTO at SCEI.  “SCEI remains fully committed to COLLADA: it forms a key part of the PLAYSTATION3 tools strategy.  SCEI has become a Khronos Promoter so that we can fully support COLLADA, OpenGL® ES and other Khronos standards.”

COLLADA supports all the features that modern 3D interactive authoring applications need to exchange and fully preserve asset data and its feature set is expanding to incorporate technologies such as packaging programmable shader effects and controlling real-time physics engines. This new standard will enable powerful content creation pipelines that can automatically condition and scale 3D geometry and texture assets for real-time playback on a wide diversity of platforms - and will be developed in a dedicated Khronos working group that any Khronos member will be free to join.

“By designing authoring and acceleration standards in one organization, Khronos can ensure that COLLADA will enable powerful tool stacks for compelling 3D content across all OpenGL ES delivery platforms,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, chairman of the OpenGL ES Working Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA.  “The availability of the same API across platforms from cell phones to high-performance consoles, combined with state-of-the–art authoring tools, makes OpenGL ES an attractive target for ISV development.”

“Alias supports COLLADA joining Khronos and we will be integrating COLLADA into our FBX SDK architecture,” said Michel Besner, vice president business development, emerging markets, Alias.  “Alias and Khronos share the same vision of making 3D graphics capabilities available any time, any where and we look forward to helping to make that vision come true.”

“Autodesk is thrilled that COLLADA is joining the Khronos Group”, said Marc Petit, vice president, Autodesk Media & Entertainment, “We thank Sony Computer Entertainment for its leadership in creating a much needed 3D authoring data exchange solution. COLLADA brings definitive efficiencies to customers who implement pipelines featuring both 3ds max and games middleware solutions such as the Unreal Engine from Epic Games. We are looking forward to keep on working actively within the Khronos Group on the development of COLLADA.”  

“Softimage intends to join Khronos and continue to play a key role in the development and deployment of this important authoring standard,” said Marc Stevens, director of research & development and product management at Softimage Co., a subsidiary of Avid Technology, Inc. “Since the beginning of the initiative, Softimage has been a strong supporter of COLLADA as a technology to enable our tools to develop content for a wide variety of platforms - and so we welcome the broad participation and guaranteed long-term standards availability that Khronos brings to the 3D industry.”

Presentations at SIGGRAPH 2005

COLLADA: An open Digital Asset Exchange Schema for the Interactive 3D Industry
Wednesday August 3rd, 1-3pm. Hall J, Room 1.  More information at: http://www.siggraph.org/s2005/main.php?f=conference&p=exhibitor&s=index

OpenGL ES: “Birds of a Feather” Meeting
Tuesday August 2nd, 2-4pm.  Manhattan C, Sheraton Downtown 711 S Hope St, Los Angeles.  More information at: http://www.khronos.org/news/events/.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as COLLADA, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL™ ES and OpenML™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of 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 media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Further Expands Membership and Announces New Dates for Developer University Series

Developers and press are invited to meet the new and current members at free technology forums covering all Khronos Media APIs August 2nd at Siggraph 2005, and October 26th at the Austin Game Developers Conference


May 17, 2005 – Clearlake Park, California – The Khronos™ Group is very pleased to announce that Aplix Corporation, Barco, Beatnik, BitFlash, Broadcom, Emuzed, Fraunhofer IIS, MTIS, Packetvideo, Philips Software, Siemens Communications and Skyworks Inc. have become Khronos Contributing Members to participate in the ongoing development and promotion of open, royalty-free embedded media API standards to grow the markets for hardware and software products that enable authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices.  Also announced today, Silicon Studio has become a Khronos Adopter for OpenGL® ES 1.0, enabling them to test their products for conformance with the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification and use the OpenGL ES logo. 

Press and Developers Invited to Khronos Developer’s University and Siggraph BOFs
Khronos Developer University (DevU) will deliver in-depth technology lectures on the state of Khronos API development on August 2nd at Siggraph 2005 in Los Angeles, and on October 26th at the Austin Game Developers Conference.  Speakers will include: Dr. Jon Peddie of TechWatch; and representatives from Khronos Member companies 3Dlabs, Hybrid Graphics and Qualcomm. Attendance does not require a trade show or conference badge.  Khronos DevU provides free opportunities to learn about Khronos APIs, interact with key industry participants and see demonstrations of new products that use the Khronos APIs.  Khronos DevU has already graduated over 1000 attendees in Helsinki, London, San Francisco, Seoul and Tokyo. For more information and to register for DevU please visit http://www.khronos.org/news/events/. 

”Khronos warmly welcomes all our new members, as the broadening participation in our standardization process enables us to be an ever-more effective forum for building market opportunities for the industry,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and senior vice president of market development at 3Dlabs.  “It is quite striking how the new membership has a diverse interest in all of the Khronos APIs currently in development; from 2D and 3D graphics and video to safety critical displays.  This diversity helps Khronos accurately build a coherent “big picture” strategy for processing numerous types of media across many embedded markets.”

“Barco is an international company that provides visualization and display solutions for niche professional markets,” says Jeff Malacarne, Director of Engineering for BarcoView Command & Control in Duluth, GA.  “In addition to a variety of large screen and workstation-oriented visualization solutions, Barco develops several rugged and embedded products for Avionics and other life-critical applications.  Khronos activities for embedded standardization play a key role in enabling design re-use and accelerating integration for these types of platforms, which have been historically dependent on proprietary interfaces.” http://www.barco.com

“A key component of Beatnik’s strategy is to help develop specifications for open industry standards and to provide pre-eminent support in our products for these formats and interfaces”, says Jeremy Copp, Chief Sales Officer at Beatnik. “Beatnik’s commitment to standards initiatives and our ability to deliver support for new interfaces to the wireless industry will provide the opportunity for the rapid specification, implementation and rollout of a Khronos OpenMAX MIDI component.” http://www.beatnik.com

“BitFlash is excited to become a participant in the Khronos group”, says Don Liberty, Director of Business Development at BitFlash. “Establishing an open standard for the development of 2D Graphics in the mobile community is something to which BitFlash has long been committed, and being part of this consortium substantiates our long-standing efforts.”

“We expect the standardization of graphics and codec interfaces to increase the speed of adoption of rich multimedia in a range of portable devices, building on the considerable success of OpenGL ES. Broadcom welcomes the work that Khronos has done to date and is pleased to join the organization as a Contributor member to support the development of OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenMAX,” said Dr. Robert Swann, Director of Marketing for Broadcom’s Mobile Multimedia Business Unit.

“The Emuzed highly optimized multimedia applications and technologies build upon internationally agreed standards”, says Dr. Rajesh Srivathsa, Chief Technical Officer at Emuzed, a Flextronics company. “Emuzed multimedia solutions with support for the OpenMAX standard will provide customers with a greater range of interoperable choices, and enable them to bring products to market faster.” http://www.emuzed.com

“We are glad to contribute to Khronos as Fraunhofer IIS has always been committed to open standards,” says Harald Popp, head of the Multimedia Realtime Systems Department of Fraunhofer IIS.  “As the leading research laboratory in the area of high quality low bit-rate audio coding, we will contribute to the OpenMAX API specifications to grant an easy portability of our audio coding software to various operating systems and to enable easy porting across hardware architectures.” http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de

“MTIS sees Khronos as a opportunity for new business solutions,” says Hwanyong Lee, dean of Research Institutes for MTIS. “Our company has extensive experience in developing software as a partner of major mobile phone makers in Korea. We have the technology and experience to integrate mobile solutions such as Java platform, multimedia and User Interface into mobile phones. MTIS will be developing API’s, accelerating hardware and solutions based on Khronos standards.” http://www.mtis.co.kr

“As a leading provider of embedded multimedia solutions for mobile phones, PacketVideo supports open standard application programming interfaces such as OpenMAX and OpenGL ES for future mobile multimedia terminals,” says Joel Espelien, PacketVideo vice president of strategy. “PacketVideo is pleased to be a member of Khronos, and expects that OpenMAX media libraries and primitives and Khronos 2D and 3D graphic specifications for embedded solutions will become important for the expansion of the industry.”

“Siemens Communications is committed to open standards and will support the efforts to specify the application programming interface in the Khronos Group. Siemens Communications’ has a leading position and expertise in all multimedia related standardization bodies like 3GPP, ITU-T, IMTC, OMA in combination with the product portfolio ranging from wireline networks to mobile multimedia terminals and to services,” says Ivan K. Ivanov, Director of Strategy and Standardization for Siemens Communications. “Siemens is willing to make the bridge between the results of the work in the Khronos Group and the existing wireline and wireless multimedia standards. These open standards are also expected to be promoted through implementation in Siemens Communications’ multimedia product portfolio. http://www.siemens.com/communications

“Skyworks is pleased to join the Khronos Group and promote open industry standards for next generation multimedia services,” says Greg Waters, vice president and general manager of Cellular Systems for Skyworks. “Open multimedia APIs, such as OpenGL-ES and OpenMax, are a key part of Skyworks’ vision, enabling rapid innovation and differentiation for our customers in developing multimedia centric mobile devices, while taking advantage of Skyworks’ innovative GSM/GPRS/EDGE open baseband architecture.”

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium creating open standard APIs such as OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenML™ and OpenVG™, to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices, including 3D graphics on mobile phones.  Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, vote at various stages before public release, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications by having early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Group Launches OpenML Open Source SDK

New Member Skymicro and other Khronos Members demonstrate OpenML on
shipping products at NAB April 18–21 at the Las Vegas Convention Center

April 18, 2005 – National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), Las Vegas – The Khronos Group today announced that its implementation of the OpenML® API is to be made available as open source on Sourceforge.  The OpenML specification provides software and hardware developers with a professional-grade, cross-platform, standardized media framework for the capturing, processing, synchronizing and playing of digital media content – including video, audio and 3D graphics – for authoring and content creation systems.  The open source SDK is based largely on SGI’s implementation of dmSDK and contains: libraries and utilities to enable OpenML applications to run on Linux, IRIX® and Windows systems; source and header files for the libraries to enable new OpenML applications to be built; source code for example OpenML applications and audio and video device modules and full documentation.  The source is expected to be available on Sourceforge within two weeks under a derivative of the SGI FreeB license which permits full commercial use of the code for building commercial applications. 

Khronos is also pleased to announce that Skymicro, a leading manufacturer of digital video equipment for the TV industry, has joined the Khronos Group as a Contributing member in order to participate in the ongoing evolution of the OpenML API.  Skymicro will be demonstrating on booth #SL3761 an OpenML application that records and plays uncompressed video through a Merlin board.

”The ground-breaking technology of SGI’s dmSDK is not only a key component of the OpenML standard – but is now available as part of the OpenML open source as a significant enabler to many companies creating media creation tools and platforms,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and senior vice president of market development at 3Dlabs.  “Khronos believes that open source is the most effective vehicle to drive the continued adoption of OpenML as it will foster a community of developers that can work together to extend platform and device support for the good of the industry.”

“SGI¬ is delighted to see the accelerating deployment of OpenML-based systems,” said Frank Bernard, OpenML working group chair and technical lead at SGI.  “As the creator of OpenGL, and the first implementer of OpenML, SGI is firmly committed to the development of open standards. When fragmented, proprietary APIs are replaced by broadly supported industry standards, customers will be the ultimate winners.”

“The OpenML SDK brought to the open source community is another exciting step forward that will build momentum behind the standard and benefit all manufacturers of graphics and video applications,” explains Jean-Luc Dery, product development manager at Autodesk MED/Discreet. “Whether working on a video or film production, developing a game, or simply streaming multimedia content, creators and their end users will benefit alike from the SDK which provides a more coherent way to orchestrate multiple media applications and hardware peripherals.”

Khronos OpenML Working Group Members invite you to view demonstrations of shipping products running OpenML technology on their booths at NAB

Autodesk MED/Discreet will be demonstrating its award winning flame® special effects system and smoke DI editing/finishing system on stand SL1920.  Both products use the IRIX OpenML SDK and will be demonstrated on the SGI Tezro platform with the Dmedia Pro video I/O option.

DVS is demonstrating on booth #SL1260 OpenML on CLIPSTER®, the one-stop DI system, demonstrating real-time editing, conforming, finishing and color correction. Being a one-stop solution in the post production area includes having an open system and thus to provide the capability for our customers to use 3rd party applications whenever they like. With the support of OpenML we make the doors wide for CLIPSTER® to be a platform for multiple applications thereby enhancing the creative possibilities of every user.

SGI will be demonstrating on booth #SL1943 how Open ML is used to support playback of nominal 4K film and video images in real-time. Four DM3 cards each output a full resolution 1920x1080 image, which are input to the Sony 4K SXRD projector where they are composited to a 3840x2160 frame.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium creating open standard APIs such as OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenML™ and OpenVG™, to enable the creation and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices, including 3D graphics on mobile phones.  Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, vote at various stages before public release, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications by having early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Reports Dramatic Growth in Asia-Pacific Membership and OpenGL ES Adopters

Developers and press are invited to meet the new and current members at a free all-day technology forum covering all Khronos Media APIs on 
April 8, 2005 in Tokyo and April 12, 2005 in Seoul

March 29, 2005 – Clearlake Park, California – The Khronos™ Group is very pleased to announce that NEC has become a Khronos Contributing Member to participate in the ongoing development and promotion of open, royalty-free embedded media API standards.  Also announced today, 3D Incorporated of Japan; AIT (Alpha Imaging Technology), Brogent, Quanta Computer, MediaTEK and VIA of Taiwan;  Gomid and Magic Eyes of Korea; and Tata Elxsi of India have all become Adopters of OpenGL® ES 1.0, enabling them to test their products for conformance with the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification and use the OpenGL ES logo.

Press and Developers Invited to Attend Khronos “DevU” Developer’s University
Khronos Member media experts will deliver several in-depth technology lectures on the state of Khronos API development on April 8, 2005 in Tokyo and April 12, 2005 in Seoul.  The Khronos DevU sessions are completely free, but registration is required at http://www.khronos.org/devu/register.html.  Besides covering a wide variety of media and embedded graphics subjects, Khronos Members will deliver product announcements and demos on their new products that are now implementing the Khronos APIs.  Full descriptions of session content are available at: http://www.khronos.org/devu.  Speakers will include: Dr. Jon Peddie of TechWatch; and representatives from Khronos Member companies 3Dlabs, Bitboys, HI Corp, Hybrid Graphics, Nokia, Renesas, Samsung, SMedia, Sun Microsystems. Texas Instruments, XCE and more.

Translations of Khronos Group general information and specific API overviews are available for our Korean, Japanese and Chinese speaking friends:
http://www.khronos.org/translations/

“Khronos welcomes NEC as a member, particularly as Asia is a leader in many embedded media markets and it is through the participation of respected companies, such as NEC, that the industry can create the standards that fuel market innovation,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and senior vice president of market development at 3Dlabs.  “The rapid increase in OpenGL ES Adopters is an indicator that the time for widely available accelerated embedded 3D graphics is almost here – creating a significant opportunity for software developers everywhere.”

3D Inc. offers the embedded 3D market an OpenGL ES driver implementation which can be ported to various platforms including hardware accelerators, and soon, an innovative shader-enabling scene graph API, RTR-Engine, running on both OpenGL and OpenGL ES. http://www.ddd.co.jp

AIT (Alpha Imaging Technology) is a leader in highly integrated camera phone multimedia IC. Their single chip solution contains camera ISP, JPEG, MPEG4, H263, MP3, 2D graphics, and JAVA MIDP2.0 hardware acceleration. AIT will integrate OpenGL ES. http://www.a-i-t.com.tw

Brogent is a provider of both multimedia embedded/mobile software solution and state-of-the-art multimedia content design services. Brogent is developing an OpenGL ES API-savvy version of its Brogent Image Processing Engine. http://www.brogent.com 

GOMID is a leading developer of software products supporting linkage between wired and wireless internet or content, enabling users to enjoy seamless content on any device. GOMID will add OpenGL ES support to their 3D engine for applications on cell phones and PDAs. http://www.gomid.com

MagicEyes Digital will be integrating OpenGL ES support into their VRender 3D SoC solution for 3D graphics on portable game machines, PDAs and mobile phones. http://www.mesdigital.com

MediaTek Incorporation is a professional fabless IC company. They will bring OpenGL ES to their chipset solutions. http://www.mtk.com.tw

Tata Elxsi provides customized design solutions, from Automotive to Aerospace, Bioinformatics to Consumer Electronics, Entertainment to FMCG, media to Storage, Semicon to Telecom. They specialize in OpenGL optimization and application development and are developing their own OpenGL ES 1.1 library and gaming engine. http://www.tataelxsi.com

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium creating open standard APIs such as OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenML™ and OpenVG™, to enable the creation and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices, including 3D graphics on mobile phones.  Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, vote at various stages before public release, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications by having early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Group Grows to Over 80 Members

Developers and press are invited to meet members at a free all-day 
Khronos Media API technology forum on March 10, 2005 in San Francisco

March 7, 2005 – San Francisco, California – From the Embedded System Conference & Game Developer Conference: The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that Atsana, Hantro, Infineon Technologies, QNX, Quantum3D and Sky Mobilemedia have become Khronos Contributing Members to participate in the ongoing development and promotion of open, royalty-free, embedded media acceleration API standards to enable dynamic media hardware and software markets on a wide variety of platforms from cell phones to games consoles to automobiles and aircraft.  In another related announcement today, Khronos proudly announced that Freescale Semiconductor (NYSE:FSL) has joined the Khronos Group as a Promoting Member.

Press and Developers Invited to Attend Khronos “DevU” Developer’s University.
Khronos member media experts will deliver over 20 in-depth technology lectures on Khronos APIs on Thursday March 10, 2005 from 9:00 am to 8:00 PM, at “Mezzanine” at 444 Jessie Street; just two blocks from the Game Developer and Embedded Systems Conferences at Moscone Center in San Francisco.  The Khronos DevU sessions are completely free, and do not require a trade show or conference badge.  Please register at http://www.khronos.org/devu/register.html.  Besides covering a wide variety of media and embedded graphics subjects, Freescale and other Khronos members will make product announcements and demo new products that implement Khronos APIs.  Full descriptions of session content are available at: http://www.khronos.org/devu/locations/sanfrancisco2005.html.  Speakers will include: Dr. Jon Peddie of TechWatch; and representatives from Khronos Member companies 3Dlabs, ALT Software, ATI, Falanx Microsystems, Freescale Semiconductor, Hybrid Graphics, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Nokia, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Quantum3D, Seaweed Systems, Texas Instruments and more.

“We warmly welcome our most recent members from a diverse cross-section of the embedded media food-chain; strengthening Khronos’ ability to create embedded media APIs that have the full support of the industry and genuinely represent the needs of a broad range of markets,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and senior vice president of market development at 3Dlabs.  “Khronos will continue to evolve and adapt to ensure that our growing membership translates into increased momentum; enabling us to continue to provide timely media acceleration APIs for the fast-moving embedded industry.”

“Atsana Semiconductor has joined Khronos Group to adopt and actively contribute to the standardization of multimedia API standards to further strengthen our multimedia solution offering for the mobile handset market,” said Vivek Chhabra, head of product solutions and partnerships at Atsana. “By providing industry standards multimedia rich compliant APIs under our RAMP platform offering, we believe it will allow developers and customers to deliver high performance products in minimal time.” http://www.atsana.com

“Hantro is pleased to join the Khronos group and as a contributing member we are looking forward to taking an active role in the development of multimedia API specifications,” says Sami Niska - product manager, Hantro. “We believe that OPENMAX API’s will play a significant role in the future of multimedia application development and, by ensuring compatibility, we will enable our customers to quickly achieve optimal video performance from our codec solutions.” http://www.hantro.com.

“Infineon Technologies is a leading provider of semiconductors for mobile solutions and will promote and implement open standard application programming interfaces like OpenGL ES on its wide variety of wireless solution platforms for future mobile multimedia terminals,” says Dominik Bilo, vice president sales and group marketing of the Communication Business Group at Infineon Technologies. “Infineon’s proven knowledge of mobile platforms and strong commitment to open standards is expected to accelerate the specification, implementation and test of Khronos 2D and 3D graphic specifications for embedded solutions will into further markets.”  http://www.infineon.com.

“QNX has long focused on optimizing advanced graphics to create the best user experience for embedded applications,” said Mark Roberts, director of product management at QNX. “By taking a leadership role with the Khronos Group, QNX is continuing to pave the way for standards and integrated solutions that help our customers accelerate the development of media devices and systems for the automotive, entertainment and networking industries.” http://www.qnx.com

“As a leading developer of open architecture IG solutions, embedded graphics subsystems, development software and support services for the VST and EVC markets, Quantum3D is pleased to take an active role in the important work Khronos is doing to further embedded OpenGL standards”, said Ross Q Smith, Quantum3D Co-founder and President. http://www.quantum3d.com

“SKY MobileMedia is committed to supporting open standards which promote the overall growth of the wireless market”, stated Tom Pollard, vice president of marketing for SKY. “The Khronos group is defining rich multimedia APIs which will help accelerate the rollout of compelling new mobile devices and services, and SKY MobileMedia is pleased to participate in this important effort.” http://www.skymobilemedia.com .

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium creating open standard APIs such as OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenML™ and OpenVG™, to enable the creation and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices, including 3D graphics on games consoles and mobile phones.  Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, vote at various stages before public release, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications by having early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Group Announces Freescale Semiconductor Joins as Promoting Member to Participate in the 
Development of the OpenGL ES an

Details of this news, numerous other Khronos Member announcements and more than 20 free technology lectures covering all Khronos Media APIs offered at full day 
technology forum on March 10, 2005 in San Francisco, California

March 7, 2005 – San Francisco, California – From the Embedded System Conference & Game Developer Conference: – The Khronos™ Group is very pleased to announce that Freescale Semiconductor (NYSE:FSL) has joined the Khronos Group as a Promoting Member in order to actively participate in the development and adoption of Khronos open standard APIs. 

“Freescale was one of the founding Promoters of the OpenGL® ES and the OpenMAX™ standard application programming interfaces (APIs) while part of Motorola,” said Brandon Tolany, global marketing manager, Wireless & Mobile Systems Group. “We will continue to drive the advancement of these open standard APIs in our Promoter role because we firmly believe that their adoption will dramatically improve the quality, performance and time-to-market for devices targeted at the fast growing mobile multimedia market.” 

“The rapid industry acceptance of OpenGL ES has been due to the committed participation within Khronos of Freescale, and other industry leaders, to ensure that it genuinely meet the needs of silicon, platform and games developers,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, chairman of the OpenGL ES Working Group and senior vice president of market development at 3Dlabs. “We are delighted that Khronos will now benefit from Freescale’s strategic market insights at our Board meetings as well as in the OpenGL ES and OpenMAX Working Groups that are creating the next generation of APIs for embedded media acceleration.”

Press and Developers Invited to Attend Khronos “DevU” Developer’s University March 10 2005.
Khronos Members media experts will deliver over 20 in-depth technology lectures on the state of Khronos API development on Thursday March 10, 2005 from 9:00 am to 8:00 PM, at “Mezzanine” at 444 Jessie Street; just two blocks from the Game Developer and Embedded Systems Conferences at Moscone Center in San Francisco.  The Khronos DevU sessions are completely free, and do not require a trade show or conference badge.  Please register at http://www.khronos.org/devu/register.html.  Besides covering a wide variety of media and embedded graphics subjects, Freescale and other Khronos members will give numerous product announcements and demos on their new products that are now implementing the Khronos APIs.  Full descriptions of session content are available at: http://www.khronos.org/devu/locations/sanfrancisco2005.html. 
Speakers will include: Dr. Jon Peddie of TechWatch; and representatives from Khronos Member companies 3Dlabs, ALT Software, ATI, Falanx Microsystems, Freescale Semiconductor, Hybrid Graphics, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Nokia, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Quantum3D, Seaweed Systems, Texas Instruments and more.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium creating open standard APIs such as OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenML™ and OpenVG™, to enable the creation and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices, including 3D graphics on games consoles and mobile phones.  Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, vote at various stages before public release, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications by having early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Invites Public Review of New Generation 
OpenGL ES 1.2 and 2.0 Specification Drafts Prior to Anticipated Public Release

Details of this news, numerous other Khronos Member announcements and twenty technology lectures covering all Khronos Media APIs offered at full day 
technology forum on March 10, 2005 in San Francisco, California

February 28, 2005 – Clearlake Park, California – The Khronos™ Group today announced that draft specifications of the OpenGL® ES 1.2 and 2.0 API (application programming interface) standards are available, on schedule, for public review by selected applicants.  Khronos invites any interested party to execute a Khronos Reviewer’s Agreement and provide feedback and guidance to the OpenGL ES Working Group to ensure that these important industry standards meet the needs of the industry.  Details about this review phase, the Reviewer’s Agreement and more details about OpenGL ES – including a Table of Contents of each draft specification – are available at http://www.khronos.org/opengles/review.  Both versions of the API are expected to be publicly released in the summer of 2005.

Khronos has adopted a dual-track roadmap for OpenGL ES as new-generation programmable graphics engines are being prepared to ship into embedded devices from games consoles to cell-phones.  OpenGL ES 1.X specifications will continue to be evolved to support enable new generations of fixed function 3D accelerators while OpenGL ES 2.0 is the first embedded 3D API with full shading language programmability through the OpenGL ES Shading Language – a close derivative of the desktop OpenGL Shading Language.  OpenGL ES 2.X specifications will be developed over time to expose the capabilities of evolving programmable hardware.

“The two-track OpenGL ES roadmap satisfies the unique demands of embedded graphics as the industry creates low-cost, low-power programmable graphics solutions,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, chairman of the OpenGL ES Working Group and senior vice president of market development at 3Dlabs.  “OpenGL ES 2.0 will bring the programmable power of the OpenGL Shading Language to embedded devices just one year after it was ratified for the desktop – but the diverse embedded market also demands continued support for fixed function accelerators.  By separating the 1.X and 2.X API tracks we can design streamlined APIs that minimize implementation cost and power – while enabling platform vendors to choose the APIs that provide precisely the functionality they need.”

“Khronos’ innovative approach to the OpenGL ES roadmap will smooth the transition to embedded programmable graphics – with the 1.X fixed function APIs and 2.X pure programmable APIs being designed to minimize the effort to port applications to shader-capable hardware,” said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research. “The OpenGL ES Working Group continues to achieve its schedule milestones for evolving this key API – which is vital to success in the fast moving embedded industry.”

Press and Developers Invited to Attend Khronos “DevU” Developer’s University March 10 2005
Media experts from the Khronos membership will deliver over twenty in-depth technology lectures on Khronos APIs on Thursday March 10, 2005 from 9:00 am to 8:00 PM, at “Mezzanine” at 444 Jessie Street; just two blocks from the Game Developer and Embedded Systems Conferences at Moscone Center in San Francisco.  Attendance is free and all are welcome - register at: http://www.khronos.org/devu/register.html.  Khronos members will also demo numerous new OpenGL ES implementations.  Full descriptions of session content are available at: http://www.khronos.org/devu/locations/sanfrancisco2005.html. 

Speakers will include: Dr. Jon Peddie of TechWatch; and representatives from Khronos Member companies 3Dlabs, ALT Software, ATI, Falanx, Freescale, Hybrid Graphics, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Nokia, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Quantum3D, Seaweed Systems, Texas Instruments and more.

About OpenGL ES
The OpenGL ES standard is royalty-free and defines subset profiles of OpenGL® to enable small-footprint embedded applications with advanced graphics capabilities and has been widely adopted by the wireless and gaming industries.  The OpenGL ES 1.1 and EGL 1.1 specifications are available for free download at http://www.khronos.org/opengles/spec.html for any third party to implement in products with no licensing restrictions or royalties.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium creating open standard APIs such as OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenML™ and OpenVG™, to enable the creation and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices, including 3D graphics on mobile phones.  Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, vote at various stages before public release, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications by having early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Invites Public Review of Draft OpenVG Specification as New Member 
Zoomon Joins as Contributing Member

Development of open standard for vector graphics acceleration on schedule 
and gaining strong industry support; Final specification expected in spring 2005

December 8, 2004 – Clearlake Park, California – The Khronos™ Group today announced that the first draft specification of the OpenVG™ API (application programming interface) standard is available, on schedule, for public review.  Khronos invites any interested party to execute a Khronos Reviewer’s Agreement and provide feedback and guidance to the OpenVG Working Group to ensure that this important industry standard meets the needs of the industry.  Details about this review phase, the Reviewer’s Agreement and more details about OpenVG – including a Table of Contents of the draft specification – are available at http://www.khronos.org/openvg.

Khronos is also very pleased to announce that Zoomon has joined the Khronos Group as a Contributing Member in order to actively participate in the development of OpenVG, and to get early access to the final specification.  ZOOMON is a company committed to delivering standards based product solutions and is the leading provider of Mobile SVG solutions designed to enhance and expand the range of services and opportunities for users of mobile phones, http://www.zoomon.com.

“Zoomon is very pleased to join the Khronos group and we plan to take an active role in furthering the important work that is currently underway under the OpenVG initiative,” said Brad Sipes, CTO of ZOOMON Mobile Solutions.  “In particular, we believe that the OpenVG work will enable the mobile industry to develop a more compelling offering of rich content services than exists today and to make these services available to consumers even on lower priced handsets.” 

The OpenVG working group has been founded and promoted by a number of Khronos Members including 3Dlabs, ATI, Bitboys, Ericsson, Hybrid Graphics, Imagination Technologies, Motorola, Nokia, PalmSource, SGI, Symbian and Sun Microsystems.  OpenVG is on a fast-track development schedule with the first draft specification created after just six months and final ratification and public release of the OpenVG 1.0 specification expected in the spring of 2005. 

OpenVG is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that will provide 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.  The working group is also ensuring that OpenVG can be seamlessly integrated with the 3D graphics of OpenGL ES to create a fully integrated 2D and 3D graphics acceleration environment.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium creating open standard APIs such as OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenML™ and OpenVG™, to enable the creation and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices, including 3D graphics on mobile phones.  Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, vote at various stages before public release, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications by having early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Dramatically Expands Membership and Developer Education in Asia Pacific Region

Khronos now over seventy Members strong; hosting Educational Developer Sessions in Seoul including speakers from Samsung and SK Telecom 


December 2, 2004 – Clearlake Park, California – The Khronos™ Group is very pleased to announce that 
LG Electronics, Mtekvision Co, NC Soft and Nexus Chips Co., Ltd from Korea, Advanced Driver Information Technology Corporation and Digital Media Professionals from Japan and SMEDIA of Taiwan, have become Khronos Contributing Members to participate in the ongoing development and promotion of open, royalty-free embedded media API standards. 

Khronos is also pleased to host a speaking session at COEX, Seoul on December 8, 2004.
Developers and press are invited to attend a “Khronos DevU” educational session to hear lectures on OpenGL ES and OpenVG and to see demos by Member companies SK Telecom, Fathammer, HI Corporation, Reakosys, Samsung and SMEDIA.  Descriptions of session content available at: http://www.khronos.org/devu/locations/seoul2004.html.  The event is free of charge and will be held 9:00 – 17:00 Wednesday, December 8, 2004 at the COEX, World Trade Center – Room #203.  For a map to the event please go to http://www.coex.co.kr/English/.

“The Khronos Group is focused on the creation of open standard, royalty- free multi-media APIs, and the OpenVG working group is leading the standardization effort of vector graphics acceleration to help create dynamic and rich user interfaces and real- time vector graphics on small digital media appliances, as well as Digital TVs and Set-top boxes,” said Dr. Kil-Su Eo, Vice President of Digital Media division at Samsung Electronics.  “As a member of the OpenVG working group, Samsung is glad to participate at Khronos Developer University in Seoul, and we hope that this event can help to educate the development community desires for advanced and dynamic user interfaces and rich graphic content.”

“As a Promoting Member of the Khronos Group, SK Telecom is pleased to present the SKT GIGA platform at Khronos Developer University in Seoul, and to discuss our product development on the OpenGL ES platform,” said Won Hee Sull, Vice President of Platform R&D Center at SK Telecom.  “We are also happy to include in our presentation our High Level Engine Partners: Gomid, Reakosys, HI and Fathammer.  Like SK Telecom, they are also pioneers in advanced mobile telecommunication technologies and have selected OpenGL ES their standard graphics API for 3D handheld applications.” 

“Fathammer is pleased to appear at Khronos DevU on December 8 2005 with our development partner NetDol to discuss how to convert mobile 3D games from the PC/Arcade platform to the Mobile platform, and to demonstrate OpenGL ES 1.0 running on an Intel-based smart phone,” said John Lee, Director of APAC Sales & Marketing,  Fathammer.

“LG Electronics is a strong proponent of industry standards and is active on a number of standardization committees,” says Jin Sung Choi, vice president, Mobile Communication Technology Research Lab, LG Electronics. “The Khronos Group will accelerate the rate of industry innovation benefiting solution vendors, handset manufacturers, and operators as well as consumers. As a member of Khronos, we are looking forward to acquiring new industry leading technologies through this opportunity.”

“NCsoft Corporation has selected the OpenGL ES API in order to take leadership in the field of mobile game development and the online MMORPG industry,” said Hyungjip Kim, vice president of Game Development Unit at NCsoft Corporation. “We will spare no effort to take on new challenges and opportunities in developing 3D online games in the mobile market, and our new Khronos Membership reflects our commitment to the advancement of OpenGL ES.”
“SMEDIA is glad to join the Khronos Group and to lecture on this important new graphic specification, as we feel OpenGL ES is a large contributor to driving quality 3D graphics into the mobile handset market,” said Mr. HY Lin, General Manager of SMEDIA.  “SMEDIA will continue to support OpenGL ES across our co-processor line of products and we are working with a wide range of third parties to deliver middleware and engine solutions.” 

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenML™ and OpenVG™, to enable the creation and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices,  including 3D graphics on mobile phones.  All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, vote at various stages before public release, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications by having early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

New SMEDIA Technology Corporation Launches into the Multimedia IC Design Market

October 25, 2004 - PT/Expocomm, Beijing, China: SMEDIA TECHNOLOGY CORP is pleased to announce their immediate launch as the first IC design company in Taiwan to offer comprehensive design capabilities, including graphics, video, and imaging-related multimedia ICs.

The initial capital size of SMEDIA is US$ 6 million, and the major shareholder is United Microelectronics Corporation (NYSE: UMC; TSE: UMC). Currently, there are 60 employees in SMEDIA, with 70% of them in R&D. Mr. HY Lin, General Manager of SMEDIA, was previously the Senior Vice President of Integrated Technology Express, Inc. (TSE: ITE). Many of the R&D, Sales and Marketing staff at SMEDIA are formerly from the Multimedia Product Department of Silicon Integrated System (TSE:SiS). Because of this extensive background in developing cutting-edge multimedia products; SMEDIA is now able to offer the most advanced graphics accelerator, imaging and video technologies from SiS; together with the unique power-saving design developed by SMEDIA to offer market-leading mobile multimedia co-processors for hand held devices.

Along with the announcement of the new company, SMEDIA is also very pleased to announce Glamo 3360, a co-processor designed for accelerating the multimedia features of camera mobile phones. Glamo 3360 has the same level processor for image signal as a digital camera, and provides a completely hardwired JPEC/MPEG/H.263 encoder/decoder.

Glamo 3360 is the first highly-integrated IC for mobile phone including all the current visual functions demanded by consumers today. Glamo 3360 is unique in that it is the first co-processor with a built-in full 2D graphic accelerator engine (following the J2ME standard) and a 3D graphic accelerator engine (following the OpenGL ES® API and the D3DM standard). Under current camera mobile phone architecture, Glamo 3360 could help to easily upgrade a standard camera mobile phone to be a “media mobile phone,” with Video Conference, Video Recording, Graphic User Interface, and Complex 3D Games. .

SMEDIA is also pleased to announce that they have been invited by the Khronos Group to demonstrate the new Glamo technology on the Khronos group Booth #6675 at PT Expocomm, Beijing on October 26-30, 2004; and that Alan Tsai, Deputy Director of the R&D department at SMEDIA will lecture developers about their extensive experience with hardwired graphic acceleration on OpenGL ES at a session at PT/Expocomm on October 27th, from 9:30 to 16:00 in Session Room #221 Seminar Room - 2nd Floor CIEC Service Building. SMEDIA has been a member of the Khronos Group for several years and is committed to the development of OpenGL ES; a graphic API developed for 3D handheld devices. The Khronos Group focuses on developing OpenGL ES and OpenML for different applications. These royalty-free and open standards API can be applied to various platforms and peripherals, and provide play/edit functions for motion media.

“SMEDIA is glad to be invited to lecture on this important new graphic specification at PT/Expocomm, as they feel OpenGL ES is a large contributor to driving quality 3D graphics into the mobile handset market,” said Mr. HY Lin, General Manager of SMEDIA. “SMEDIA will continue to support OpenGL ES across their co-processor line of products and is working with a wide range of third parties to deliver middleware and engine solutions.”

 

Khronos Launches Developer University Lecture Series and OpenGL ES Coding Challenge Contest

New initiatives to drive developer adoption of Khronos APIs and to catalyze open library of example source; Hybrid Graphics to supply free PC version of OpenGL ES to contest entrants

August 25, 2004 – London – The Khronos™ Group today announced two worldwide initiatives to enable and encourage software developers to make full use of OpenGL® ES and other Khronos APIs in compelling handheld applications and games.  The OpenGL ES standard is royalty-free and defines subset profiles of OpenGL® to enable small-footprint embedded applications with advanced graphics capabilities and has been widely adopted by the wireless and gaming industries. The Khronos Developer University (DevU) Lecture Series consists of day-long educational sessions in North America, Europe and Asia.  The OpenGL ES Coding Challenge is a content development contest offering a series of prizes and widespread recognition to developers who wish to submit source samples that illustrate the expressive power of OpenGL ES on handheld devices.

“The mobile graphics and gaming industries need the strong standards leadership that the Khronos Group is providing to bring the market for handheld and embedded graphics to its full potential,” stated Jon Peddie, founder of Jon Peddie Research, a leading graphics industry analyst and consultancy firm.  “We are convinced that enabling software developers to take advantage of OpenGL ES is the next key step in building the mobile 3D industry, and so we strongly support these new Khronos Group’s developer outreach activities and are pleased to be a part of this exciting initiative.”

Khronos Developer University
The first Khronos DevU session will be held in London on September 1st, 2004 at the Hotel IBIS.  The lecture sessions are strongly focused on providing useful real-world information for developers and are not marketing sessions.  As a one time launch special, the first sessions in London and in Helsinki on September 17th, in conjunction with Hybrid Graphics’ 10th Anniversary celebration, will be completely free-of-charge.  Additional cities in the DevU series include Tokyo, Seoul, San Francisco and Los Angeles.  More details on locations and sign-up details can be found at http://www.khronos.org/devu/.

OpenGL ES Coding Challenge
Entrants to the OpenGL ES Coding Challenge will be provided with a free copy of Hybrid’s PC implementation of OpenGL ES to provide an easy-to-use OpenGL ES development environment.  One goal of the contest is to create a library of shared source code pool for the developer community and so entrants are invited to submit sample code for OpenGL ES games, demos and screensavers.  The winners of the contest will be selected by the Khronos Members that participate in the OpenGL ES Working Group for the most effective demonstration of the power of 3D on a handheld platform.

Entries will be divided into three main categories: self-running demos or screensavers; educational “how to” sample code (such as the OpenGL Redbook Samples); and full-fledged interactive games.  Prizes to be awarded include a year long subscription to JPR Tech Watch – a leading multimedia research publication valued at $2500 and donated by Jon Peddie, the keynote speaker at Khronos DevU.  Also donated is a Wildcat Realizm professional graphics card, donated by 3Dlabs, a Promoter and original Founder of the Khronos Group.  All Award winners will be announced at GDC in San Francisco in March 2005.  More details can be found at http://www.khronos.org/devu/opengles_challenge/

“The best designed API is just an academic exercise until it is used by developers to create compelling content,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, chairman of the OpenGL ES Working Group and senior vice president of market development at 3Dlabs.  “Khronos DevU and the OpenGL ES Coding Challenge strengthen Khronos’ commitment to education and outreach to enable developers and the entire 3D industry to benefit from widely used 3D API standards.”

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on creation of open standard APIs such as OpenGL ES, OpenMAX™, OpenML™ and OpenVG™, to enable the authoring and playback of 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 media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Hybrid Graphics Gains Khronos Promoter Status

Hybrid celebrates its 10th anniversary and co-hosts an inaugural session of Khronos Developer University Lecture Series in Helsinki on 17 September, 2004

August 25, 2004 – Helsinki, Finland – The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that the computer graphics technology developer Hybrid Graphics Ltd. of Helsinki, Finland has been accepted into the governing board of the Khronos Group with a unanimous vote among the existing Promoters. Hybrid has been a Contributor level member of Khronos since 2002, has participated actively in the forming of the OpenGL ES standard and shipped the first officially conformant software implementation of the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification. By achieving Promoter Member status, Hybrid joins industry giants Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson, Sun Microsystems and Texas Instruments, among others, in governing the strategy of the Khronos Group.

Separately, the Khronos Group today announced two worldwide initiatives enabling software developers to make full use the OpenGL® ES API in compelling application and games; the Khronos Developer University Lecture Series and The OpenGL ES Coding Challenge software development contest. Commensurate with its new Promoter position, Hybrid Graphics is strongly supporting both developer initiatives by hosting one of the inaugural lecture events on 17 September in Helsinki, alongside the company’s 10th anniversary party; and by providing all contest entrants free copies of Hybrid’s implementation of OpenGL ES on several platforms. For information: http://www.khronos.org/devu/

“The unanimous acceptance of Hybrid as a Promoter is a clear recognition of Hybrid’s expertise in computer graphics technology and our commitment to OpenGL ES. We are happy that our expertise is recognized,” says Mr. Harri Holopainen, Executive VP of Hybrid Graphics. “Hybrid sees the Khronos Promoter level membership as strategically important. The mobile graphics and gaming industries need strong industry standards and the Khronos Group delivers them. Enabling software developers to take advantage of OpenGL ES is the next key step in building the mobile 3D industry – and Hybrid strongly supports Khronos’ developer outreach activities.”

“Khronos is fortunate indeed to have companies of Hybrid’s technical expertise and commercial insight willing to serve on our Board of Directors,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, chairman of the OpenGL ES Working Group and senior vice president of market development at 3Dlabs.  “The unanimous vote is testament to Hybrid’s ongoing significant contribution to the success of Khronos and OpenGL ES.”

Hybrid also plays a key role in the OpenGL ES Coding Challenge by providing all entrants with Hybrid’s implementation of OpenGL ES 1.1 Common and Common-Lite that enables software developers to use standard PCs to develop OpenGL ES applications.

About Hybrid
Hybrid develops online and mobile graphics technology including 3D visibility optimization and graphics solutions for mobile and embedded devices. With a decade of experience in developing graphics technology, Hybrid has a profound understanding of computer graphics on different platforms. Hybrid celebrates its first 10 years in September. Hybrid is a privately owned company employing 30 people in Helsinki, Finland. Please go to http://www.hybrid.fi for more information.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as OpenGL ES, OpenMAX™, OpenML™ and OpenVG™, to enable the authoring and playback of 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 media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Group Announces the On Time Delivery of the 
OpenGL ES 1.1 Specification, Available for Free Download

Second version of industry standard for embedded 3D graphics enables new-generation, low-power hardware accelerators; Khronos will update the OpenGL ES Adopter’s Program to provide conformance tests for OpenGL ES 1.1

August 9, 2004 – SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles – The Khronos™ Group announced today that it has unanimously ratified and publicly released the OpenGL® ES 1.1 and EGL 1.1 specifications, meeting the Khronos Group’s commitment to provide an update to the industry-leading application programming interface (API) for embedded 3D graphics, precisely one year after its initial release.  The OpenGL ES standard is royalty-free and defines subset profiles of OpenGL® to enable small-footprint embedded applications with advanced graphics capabilities and has been widely adopted by the wireless and gaming industries.  OpenGL ES 1.1 adds timely functionality to encourage and enable the new functionality of new-generation embedded platforms with 3D hardware acceleration; including cell-phones.  The OpenGL ES 1.1 and EGL 1.1 specifications are available for free download at http://www.khronos.org/opengles/spec.html for any third party to implement in products with no licensing restrictions or royalties.

The OpenGL ES 1.1 specification has been developed by many industry-leading companies that are members of Khronos.  OpenGL ES 1.1 emphasizes hardware acceleration of the API – while OpenGL ES 1.0 focused heavily on enabling software-only implementations.  Khronos expects both OpenGL ES 1.0 and 1.1 to be widely used across the full range of platforms in the embedded industry and OpenGL ES 1.1 is fully backwards compatible with 1.0 – enabling easy porting of applications between the two versions of the API.  The companion specification to OpenGL ES, EGL 1.1, standardizes how OpenGL ES may be integrated into a wide diversity of operating systems.

“The consolidating force in PC games was OpenGL, and history will repeat itself with the introduction of OpenGL ES for handheld devices,” said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research. “The Khronos Group is a leader in building markets for media engines with open standards, and their work will help enable the market to grow to a billion dollars.”

“Khronos is executing on its stated goal of updating OpenGL ES annually to keep pace with and enable the rapid developments of graphics capabilities in handheld and embedded devices,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, chairman of the OpenGL ES Working Group and senior vice president of market development at 3Dlabs.  “The OpenGL ES Working Group is now working on OpenGL ES 2.0 - to bring the programmable power of the OpenGL Shading Language to embedded devices in 2005 - just one year after it was ratified for the desktop.”

OpenGL ES 1.1 has new features that provide enhanced functionality, improved image quality and optimizations to increase performance while reducing memory bandwidth usage to save power:
- Buffer objects; to enable efficient caching of geometry data in graphics memory
- Enhanced texture processing; including a minimum of two multi-textures and texture combiner functionality for effects such as bump-mapping and per-pixel lighting
- Vertex skinning functionality; to smoothly animate complex figures and geometries
- User clip plane; for efficient early culling of non-visible polygons, increasing performance and saving power
- Enhanced point sprites; for efficient and realistic particle effects
- Dynamic state queries; enabling OpenGL ES to be used in a sophisticated, layered software environment
- Draw Texture; for efficient sprites, bitmapped fonts and 2D framing elements in games

Khronos expects to update the OpenGL ES Adopter’s Program to provide conformance tests for OpenGL ES 1.1 within three months, enabling interested companies to join Khronos for a small administrative fee to gain access to source code for Conformance Tests and example implementations, and to use the OpenGL ES trademark on products that pass the defined testing procedure.  This ensures that conformant OpenGL ES implementations provide a reliable, cross-platform graphics programming platform.

“Imagination Technologies is delighted to renew its commitment as a Promoter of the Khronos Group,” said John Metcalfe, VP Business Development (PowerVR), Imagination Technologies. “PowerVR MBX already fully supports OpenGL ES 1.0, and will add OpenGL ES 1.1 support this Q304. We look forward to our continued participation in the evolution of the OpenGL ES specification.  Products already announced using PowerVR MBX include Intel’s 2700G, Renesas’ SH-Mobile3 and SH7770 and TI’s OMAP2. The first MBX enabled products are already shipping as of August 2004, and consumer products will be available from this fall.”

“Nokia is proud to unveil 3D graphics APIs for Java and C++ for the leading smart phone platform, Series 60 running on Symbian OS. The Nokia 6630 smartphone will be the first mobile device on the market to be fully conformant with both OpenGL ES 1.0 Common Profile and M3G (Mobile 3D Graphics API for Java) specifications,” said Kari Pulli, Research Fellow at Nokia. “We are committed to support the charter of the Khronos Group to create open standard, royalty-free APIs across all platforms and devices; and Nokia has renewed its membership for the third year.”

“The Bitboys G30 graphics processor is not only compatible, but also compliant with the OpenGL ES 1.0 standard. We are very happy to see the evolution of this important industry standard, and we will provide support for OpenGL ES 1.1 across our entire 3D graphics processor product line immediately,” said Petri Nordlund, CTO of Bitboys.

Developers, editors or analysts with an interest in learning more about Khronos Group Standards and the effect they are having on the digital media industry are invited to a very focused series of BOFS “Birds of a Feather” sessions at Siggraph on Wednesday, August 11th at the Hyatt and Hilton Hotels; spanning across a day of learning starting with a 9:00 am keynote by Jon Peddie and Overview by Neil Trevett, through a series of hour long sessions for each of the four APIs:  OpenMAX, OpenVG. OpenML, and finally the public launch of OpenGL ES 1.1 at the OpenGL ES BOF at 3:30pm – details at http://www.khronos.org/news/events.html#siggraph04.

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as OpenGL ES, OpenMAX™, OpenML™ and OpenVG™, to enable the authoring and playback of 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 media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Group Welcomes Fujitsu, Samsung Electronics, Sony Computer Entertainment and others as New Members, and Increases Scope

Building on the strong success of OpenGL ES and OpenML—the OpenMAX and OpenVG Work Groups are launched; ALT Software, Fujitsu, Nazomi, Oplayo, Reakosys, Samsung Electronics, Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. and TKO Software all join as Members

July 19, 2004 – EXPO COMM WIRELESS JAPAN – The Khronos™ Group has announced that it has created two new API initiatives: OpenVG™ that will provide a low-level hardware acceleration interface for vector graphics libraries such as Flash and SVG on handheld devices; and OpenMAX™ that will standardize access to media processing primitives, used extensively in graphics libraries and video codecs such as OpenGL® ES and MPEG-4, to rapidly and effectively make use of the full acceleration potential of new silicon. 

All Khronos Members are able to participate in these new Working Groups as well as the ongoing development of OpenGL ES which is bringing advanced 3D graphics to mobile and embedded systems, and OpenML™ which enables easy integration of video, audio and graphics capabilities into media authoring applications.  Khronos invites any company with interest to join as a member and participate in the development of any of these standards.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org/members/index.html for more information.

Khronos is also very pleased to announce that ALT Software, Fujitsu, Nazomi, Oplayo, Reakosys, Samsung Electronics, Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. and TKO Software have joined as Contributing Members to work closely with over 50 existing Khronos Group members to support the creation of open, royalty-free standard APIs to grow the markets for hardware and software products that enable authoring and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. 

Developers, editors or analysts with an interest in learning more about Khronos Group Standards and the effect they are having on the digital media industry are invited to an in-depth briefing with Khronos President and OpenGL ES Work Group Chairman, Neil Trevett, at EXPO COMM WIRELESS JAPAN, July 21-22, 2004, or see demos of Khronos APIs by Member companies:  ALT Software,  NVIDIA, Renesas and TAKUMI Corporation on the Khronos Stand #1022 on the North American Pavilion.  Please email briana@goldstandardgroup.com for an appointment or more information. See http://www.khronos.org/news/events.html#wirelessjapan04 for information on the Khronos Member Demos.

“The continuing growth in Khronos membership and the widening interest in using Khronos’ proven development process and infrastructure for efficiently creating and deploying media API standards, are both clear indicators that Khronos is effectively fulfilling its industry role in creating media authoring and deployment market opportunities for its members,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and senior vice president of market development at 3Dlabs.  “We particularly welcome the many new Khronos Member companies in Asia Pacific as this reflects the region’s leading-edge adoption of media technologies, and will enable Khronos to better respond to and enable the rapid developments in this dynamic market.”

Quotes from New Members

“Fujitsu will provide advanced Mobile Media Platform products, which include a graphics accelerator supporting OpenGL ES, for cellular phone and other mobile applications.” said Makoto Awaga, Deputy General Manager of DCP Solution Division, LSI group at Fujitsu. “We believe it is mandatory to support open standard APIs like OpenGL ES for multimedia consumer products. Based on our long experience in 2D/3D graphics arena, we are going to maximize the competitive advantage provided by our cutting edge accelerator technology to help establish the best optimized platform for the OpenGL ES API.”

“Reakosys believes that the successful widespread deployment of mobile 3D graphics for user interfaces, entertainment and games is dependent on industry-wide standards on which developers can rely,” said Kevin Lee, CEO of Reakosys, Inc.  “Reakosys is pleased to join the Khronos Group and will enjoy working shoulder to shoulder with our customers and partners as a Khronos Contributing Member.”

“The activities under Khronos in which Samsung will participate actively, will expedite the product development for multimedia devices as well as digital contents” said Dr. Hyung-lae Roh, Executive Vice-President of System LSI division at Samsung Electronics. “This cross-industry cooperation among top companies will have an effect of real synergy between hardware and software, thus providing the market with a greater variety of high-quality multimedia products and companies with reduced time-to-market.”

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs to enable the authoring and playback of 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.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Group Announces New OpenVG Open Standard 
for Handheld Vector Graphics Acceleration

Industry leaders 3Dlabs, Bitboys, Ericsson, Hybrid Graphics, Imagination Technologies, Nokia, Motorola, PalmSource, Symbian and Sun Microsystems found new Working Group 
and invite open industry participation

July 6, 2004 – EXPO COMM WIRELESS JAPAN – The Khronos™ Group today announced the formation of the new OpenVG™ working group to define a royalty-free, cross-platform API (application programming interface) that will provide a low-level hardware acceleration interface for vector graphics libraries such as Flash and SVG.  Already in development, 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. 

The OpenVG working group has been founded and promoted by a number of Khronos Members including 3Dlabs, Bitboys, Ericsson, Hybrid Graphics, Imagination Technologies, Motorola, PalmSource, Symbian and Sun Microsystems; and the working group is being chaired by a representative from Khronos Member Nokia.  Under the Khronos participation framework, the initial work undertaken by these companies is now open and available to any Khronos member who wishes to participate in the OpenVG working group.  OpenVG is on a fast-track development schedule with first draft specifications expected at the end of 2004.  http://www.khronos.org/openvg/

The Khronos Group has successfully developed the market-driving, open standard graphics OpenML® and OpenGL® ES APIs since 2000.  Today, in addition to the announcement of OpenVG, Khronos also announced the formation of a second new API: the OpenMAX™ initiative that will standardize access to media processing primitives, used extensively in graphics libraries and video codecs such as OpenGL ES and MPEG-4.  Khronos invites any company with interest to join as a member and participate in the development of any of these standards.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org/members/index.html for more information.

Developers, editors or analysts with an interest in learning more about Khronos Group Standards and the effect they are having on the digital media industry are invited to an in-depth briefing with Khronos President and OpenGL ES Work Group Chairman, Neil Trevett, at EXPO COMM WIRELESS JAPAN, July 21-23, 2004, or see demos of Khronos APIs in action on the Khronos Stand #1022 on the North American Pavilion.  Please email briana@goldstandardgroup.com for an appointment or more information. See http://www.khronos.org/news/events.html#wirelessjapan04 for information on the Khronos Member Demos.

Vector graphics are widely used on today’s desktop through packages such as Flash and SVG. Handheld devices have an urgent need for the smooth and fluidly scalable 2D that high-quality vector graphics provide to create high-quality user interfaces and ultra-readable text on small displays devices.  SVG Tiny, SVG Basic and Flash Mobile are designed for mobile devices, and OpenVG supports these by defining a low-level hardware acceleration layer for vector graphics operations that will enable graphics silicon to provide great performance for these packages at very low power-levels.  The working group is also ensuring that OpenVG can be seamlessly integrated with the 3D graphics of OpenGL ES to create a fully integrated 2D and 3D graphics acceleration environment.

“OpenVG fills a distinct gap in the standards spectrum, as accelerated vector graphics is an idea whose time has come; and it is fascinating that the catalytic force came from within the handheld space,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and senior vice president of market development at 3Dlabs.  “We invite the industry to join us and help create OpenVG to realize its maximum potential.  It could become the 2D API of choice for platforms that care about display quality, and creates a new opportunity for graphics vendors to add significant acceleration to handhelds; well beyond 3D for gaming.”

“OpenVG will be one of the key APIs to help manage the high demand for rich graphics on mobile devices,” says Koichi Mori, chairman of OpenVG working group, Senior Research Engineer, Nokia. “2D vector graphics have been and will be essential in a variety of applications from enterprise to entertainment. OpenVG plays a key role in facilitating a hardware vector graphics solution and it will bring a superior user experience with accelerated vector graphics.”

“Graphics acceleration has become a key requirement in advanced mobile phones,” said Bill Pinnell, Multimedia Product Strategist, Symbian. “It is vital that we have industry standards not just for 3D, but also for 2D graphics acceleration. Symbian is helping the Khronos Group define the OpenVG API to better enable advanced graphics applications and user interface designs.”

“Hybrid sees OpenVG as a crucial graphics technology for mobile phones and other embedded devices,” says Ville Miettinen, CTO of Hybrid Graphics. “Hybrid is a leading provider of mobile graphics technology, and already sees a strong demand in the market for a low-level 2D vector graphics standard. Hybrid will make an OpenVG implementation available as soon as the standard is complete.” See http://www.hybrid.fi/main/openvg/index.php for info on Hybrid’s work on OpenVG.

“Bitboys plans to support the new OpenVG vector graphics standard on its upcoming mobile graphics processors, enabling very high-quality, full-featured hardware vector graphics acceleration on next generation volume-market mobile handsets,” says Petri Nordlund, CTO of Bitboys. “Bitboys already supports SVG Tiny-level vector graphics acceleration on our G10 graphics processor.”

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs to enable the authoring and playback of 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.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Significantly Grows Membership and 
Increases Scope of Media Standards Work

ALT Software, Fujitsu, Nazomi, Oplayo, Reakosys, Samsung Electronics, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc and TKO Software join as Contributors; Hybrid Graphics and Texas Instruments become Promoters; Broadcom and others become Open GL ES 1.0 Adopters; OpenVG and OpenMAX API initiatives launched

July 6, 2004 – EXPO COMM WIRELESS JAPAN – The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that ALT Software, Fujitsu, Nazomi, Oplayo, Reakosys, Samsung Electronics, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. and TKO Software have joined as Contributing Members to work closely with over 50 existing Khronos Group members to support the creation of open, royalty-free standard APIs to grow the markets for hardware and software products that enable authoring and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices.  In more member news; Hybrid Graphics and Texas Instruments, both Contributor level Members with several years ongoing commitment to Khronos API development, have both been approved as Khronos Promoters for a closer involvement in providing strategic guidance on the Khronos Group Board of Directors.  Also announced today, Broadcom, Digital Media Professional Inc., and the Institute for Information Industry have become Khronos Adopters for OpenGL® ES 1.0, enabling them to test their products for conformance with the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification and use the OpenGL ES logo. 

Additionally, in two separate releases today, Khronos has announced that it has created two new API initiatives: OpenVG™ that will provide a low-level hardware acceleration interface for vector graphics libraries such as Flash and SVG on handheld devices; and OpenMAX™ that will standardize access to media processing primitives, used extensively in graphics libraries and video codecs such as OpenGL® ES and MPEG-4, to rapidly and effectively make use of the full acceleration potential of new silicon.  All Khronos Members are able to participate in these new Working Groups as well as the ongoing development of OpenGL ES which is bringing advanced 3D graphics to mobile and embedded systems, and OpenML™ which enables easy integration of video, audio and graphics capabilities into media authoring applications.  Khronos invites any company with interest to join as a member and participate in the development of any of these standards.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org/members/index.html for more information.

Developers, editors or analysts with an interest in learning more about Khronos Group Standards and the effect they are having on the digital media industry are invited to an in-depth briefing with Khronos President and OpenGL ES Work Group Chairman, Neil Trevett, at EXPO COMM WIRELESS JAPAN, July 21-23, 2004, or see demos of Khronos APIs by Member companies:  ALT Software, NeoMagic, NVIDIA, Renesas and TAKUMI Corporation on the Khronos Stand #1022 on the North American Pavilion.  Please email briana@goldstandardgroup.com for an appointment or more information. See http://www.khronos.org/news/events.html#wirelessjapan04 for information on the Khronos Member Demos.

“The continuing growth in Khronos membership and the widening interest in using Khronos’ proven development process and infrastructure for efficiently creating and deploying media API standards, are both clear indicators that Khronos is effectively fulfilling its industry role in creating media authoring and deployment market opportunities for its members,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and senior vice president of market development at 3Dlabs.  “We particularly welcome the many new Khronos Member companies in Asia Pacific as this reflects the region’s leading-edge adoption of media technologies, and will enable Khronos to better respond to and enable the rapid developments in this dynamic market.”

New Khronos Promoters

“Hybrid is proud to be chosen as a Promoter member, and we are honored to be recognized as one of the leading experts in graphics technology,” says Ville Miettinen, CTO of Hybrid Graphics. “Hybrid has already licensed OpenGL ES implementations to leading manufacturers, and continues to take its standardization work in Khronos seriously. Khronos has a crucial role in delivering strong, proven standards needed by the mobile content business.”  Please visit http://www.hybrid.fi for more information.

“Texas Instruments extended its commitment to open standards and the Khronos group by taking up a Promoter level membership. TI’s OMAP™ 2 architecture features high-performance multimedia accelerators which are made simple to use through APIs such as OpenGL ES and the new OpenMAX,” said Roger Nolan Marketing manager, Software Strategy, Texas Instruments and TI’s board representative at Khronos. For more information, see http://www.omap.com

New Khronos Contributors

“ALT Software is very pleased to join the Khronos group as a Contributing member in order to participate in the development of these much needed standards for low power, portable devices,” said Chris Brady, President, ALT Software.  “We invite you to see an implementation of the OpenGL ES API and ALT custom libraries running as a Real-Time Embedded solution, designed for low power, limited memory, small screen devices at EXPO COMM WIRELESS JAPAN on the Khronos booth #1022.” http://www.altsoftware.com 

“Fujitsu will provide advanced Mobile Media Platform products, which include a graphics accelerator supporting OpenGL ES, for cellular phone and other mobile applications.” said Makoto Awaga, Deputy General Manager of DCP Solution Division, LSI group at Fujitsu. “We believe it is mandatory to support open standard APIs like OpenGL ES for multimedia consumer products. Based on our long experience in 2D/3D graphics arena, we are going to maximize the competitive advantage provided by our cutting edge accelerator technology to help establish the best optimized platform for the OpenGL ES API.”

“Nazomi will help establish standards that are practical and widely supported,” said Jay Kamdar, President & CEO of Nazomi Communications Inc. “Our standards compliant applications processors provide headache free solutions for our partners & customers across the globe.”

“Reakosys believes that the successful widespread deployment of mobile 3D graphics for user interfaces, entertainment and games is dependent on industry-wide standards on which developers can rely,” said Kevin Lee, CEO of Reakosys, Inc.  “Reakosys is pleased to join the Khronos Group and will enjoy working shoulder to shoulder with our customers and partners as a Khronos Contributing Member.”

“The activities under Khronos in which Samsung will participate actively, will expedite the product development for multimedia devices as well as digital contents” said Dr. Hyung-lae Roh, Executive Vice-President of System LSI division at Samsung Electronics. “This cross-industry cooperation among top companies will have an effect of real synergy between hardware and software, thus providing the market with a greater variety of high-quality multimedia products and companies with reduced time-to-market.”

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs to enable the authoring and playback of 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.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Group Announces New OpenMAX Open Standard for Enabling Effective Media Acceleration

Semiconductor and software leaders including ARM, Motorola, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments found new Khronos Working Group 
and invite open industry participation

July 6, 2004 – EXPO COMM WIRELESS JAPAN – The Khronos™ Group today announced the formation of the new OpenMAX™ working group to define a royalty-free, cross-platform API (application programming interface) that standardizes access to multimedia processing primitives used extensively in extensively in video codecs such as MPEG-4, audio and image codecs, and 2D and 3D graphics.  The OpenMAX API will enable library and codec implementers to rapidly and effectively make use of the full potential of new silicon – regardless of the underlying hardware architecture.  The early availability of optimized media libraries on a new processor in turn encourages a rich variety of media content to be rapidly available on that platform. 

The OpenMAX working group was originally founded and promoted by a number of leading Khronos Members including ARM (LSE:ARM); (NASDAQ: ARMHY), Motorola (NASDAQ: MOT), Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (LSE:(GDR): SSNHY, KSE: 005930.KS), STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STMEF) and Texas Instruments (NASDAQ: TXN).  The initial work undertaken by these companies is now available, under the formal Khronos Group participation framework, to any Khronos member who wishes to participate in the OpenMAX working group.  http://www.khronos.org/openmax/

The Khronos Group has successfully developed market-driving open standard graphics and multimedia APIs since 2000. Today, in addition to the announcement of OpenMAX, Khronos also announced the formation of a second new API: the OpenVG™ initiative to provide a low-level hardware acceleration interface for vector graphics libraries such as Flash and SVG on handheld devices.  Khronos invites any company with interest to join as a member and participate in the development of any of these standards.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org/members/index.html for more information.

Developers, editors or analysts with an interest in learning more about Khronos Group Standards and the effect they are having on the digital media industry are invited to an in-depth briefing with Khronos President and OpenGL ES Work Group Chairman, Neil Trevett, at EXPO COMM WIRELESS JAPAN, July 21-23, 2004, or see demos of Khronos APIs in action on the Khronos Stand #1022 on the North American Pavilion.  Please email briana@goldstandardgroup.com for an appointment or more information. See http://www.khronos.org/news/events.html#wirelessjapan04 for information on the Khronos Member Demos.

The OpenMAX working group recognizes that a wide variety of third party video, still image, audio, graphics, gaming and voice applications is vital to the success of next-generation mobile devices.  However, software developers are currently losing valuable time-to-market by being forced to port and optimize their applications across different silicon architectures. OpenMAX helps solve this industry problem by defining an API to access computational primitives that typically absorb the bulk of the processing load when implementing the libraries and codecs used by these applications.  OpenMAX is being designed to be efficiently implemented on a wide variety of architectures including CPUs, DSPs and parallel processor arrays – enabling silicon vendors to provide ready-optimized OpenMAX drivers for their processors.  This in turn enables the rapid development of optimized libraries and codecs, eliminating the need for many common functions to be re-implemented by software developers as they port multimedia applications across different architectures.

“OpenMAX is a significant new standard, and a step forward in fulfilling Khronos’ charter to develop and deploy royalty-free, open standards to create graphics and dynamic media market growth,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and senior vice president of market development at 3Dlabs.  There is great synergy between all Khronos APIs: OpenGL ES, OpenVG, OpenML, and now OpenMAX; which will enable these three higher level APIs to be efficiently implemented and ported to many platforms.”

“The OpenMAX standard aligns well with ARM’s commitment to support open standards for both hardware and software interfaces,” said Derek Morris, director of multimedia, ARM and acting chairman of the OpenMAX Working Group. “OpenMAX will make a significant contribution to the availability of software that is essential for the success of new multimedia devices, by broadening software application support for all multimedia functions. This support will make it much easier for software vendors to port applications to different environments and so give them a competitive edge.”

“Motorola, and its wholly-owned subsidiary, Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., enthusiastically supports the development of the OpenMAX multimedia standard within Khronos,” said Duane Rabe,  Vice President of the Technical Staff, Personal Communications Sector, Motorola Inc. “We expect this to significantly accelerate the development of exciting new multimedia applications for mobile devices, extending far beyond the capabilities of current cellular phones. Mobile device manufacturers, semiconductor suppliers and software developers will all benefit from a common standard interface for multimedia applications, and consumers will enjoy a rich multimedia experience via a broad selection of high-performance mobile devices.”

“The OpenMAX standard will enable leading companies to promote an open interface that will be a catalyst for new features supporting a large variety of high-end multimedia applications,” said Dr. Stephen Oh, Vice President of the System LSI division at Samsung Electronics. “Samsung looks forward to working in collaboration through OpenMAX to extend innovation in mobile multimedia space.”

“STMicroelectronics supports several initiatives to enable application developers to benefit from our innovative silicon platforms,” said Alessandro Cremonesi, Vice President, Advanced System Technology, STMicroelectronics, “We welcome OpenMAX as one of them.”

“Wireless market growth is driven by the proliferation of new products and software development,” said Roger Nolan, Marketing manager, Software Strategy, Texas Instruments.  “The OpenMAX standard will accelerate such development across multiple product categories by allowing software vendors to quickly and easily realize the potential of current and next-generation multimedia accelerators.” 

About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs to enable the authoring and playback of 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.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Group Releases OpenML 1.0 SDK

Khronos Members demonstrate OpenML on shipping products at NAB;
OpenML 1.0 Open Source and Adopters Programs in development

April 19, 2004 – National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), Las Vegas – The Khronos Group today announced immediate availability of the final release of its Software Development Kit (SDK) for OpenML® 1.0.  The OpenML specification provides software and hardware developers with a complete, cross-platform, programming environment for the standardized capturing, processing, synchronizing and playing of digital media content – including video, audio and 3D graphics.  The OpenML 1.0 SDK contains: executable libraries and utilities to enable OpenML applications to run on Linux, IRIX® and Windows systems; source and header files for the libraries to enable new OpenML applications to be built; source code for example OpenML applications and audio and video device modules which can be used as a starting point for building commercial applications; and full documentation.  The license agreement for obtaining the SDK, at no charge, is available at the Khronos Group website http://www.khronos.org/developers/downloads.html.

“The OpenML specification provides hardware and software interoperability for media authoring applications; enabling more capable products to be brought to market faster and for those products to make use of any OpenML-compliant component,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and senior vice president of market development at 3Dlabs.  “The successful products you see here today running the OpenML API are just the beginning; as the availability of this SDK will encourage the widespread implementation of OpenML-compliant products and reinforces the Khronos Group’s proven track record for creating not only successful specifications, but also the infrastructure required to drive industry adoption.”

Since their release, the beta version of the OpenML SDK has been downloaded nearly 4,000 times and the OpenML API Specification over 13,000 times.  The Khronos OpenML Working Group is now defining an OpenML open source program and an OpenML Adopters Program which will define Conformance Tests to enable the OpenML trademark to be used on conformant products. Khronos has also started work on the next version of OpenML that will extend its professional media authoring capabilities while taking full advantage of advances in related standards – such as the OpenGL® Shading Language set of release in OpenGL 2.0 in mid-2004.

Khronos OpenML Working Group Members invite you to view demonstrations of shipping products running OpenML technology on their booths at NAB

Discreet is demonstrating its award-winning flame® visual effects system and smoke® editing/finishing system on stand SL3547.  Both products use OpenML 1.0 on IRIX and will be demonstrated on the SGI Tezro platform with the Dmedia Pro DM3 HD and SD video I/O option.

“Discreet is thrilled with the release of the OpenML 1.0 SDK,” says Jean-Luc Dery, product development manager at Discreet and chair of the OpenML Work Group.  “Our engineering teams are already seeing the benefits of the OpenML standard with reduced development and maintenance efforts. With the increasing number of professional-grade quality media devices available today at lower prices, it is imperative that we have a standardized toolset to better leverage and harness these technologies.”

DVS is on Stand SL4713, showing their real-time editing system CLIPSTER with real-time color correction.

“DVS is committed to promoting OpenML because we firmly believe that the future of our industry requires useful standards.  By allowing users to work individually with any preferred application, we support creativity,” says Marcus Goluecke, Product Manger at DVS GmbH.  “In line with this philosophy, we designed our real-time editing system CLIPSTER as an open platform supporting all OpenML-compatible software.”

Silicon Graphics (NYSE: SGI) on NAB Stand SL4755 are demonstrating the Silicon Graphics® Tezro™ visual workstation running the latest Discreet® smoke® 6 and Interactive Effects Piranha HD software. The DMediaPro DM3 digital option supports OpenML as part of its core functionality.

“SGI continues to support open standards and open system interoperability. As the first implementer of OpenML, we are ecstatic to see the release of the SDK,” says Shawn Underwood, director of marketing, Visuals Systems Group, SGI. “This digital media API will contribute to the growth of the digital content creation industry by providing an open software platform for media applications running across a number of operating systems and hardware. In turn, OpenGL applications will be seamlessly integrated with audio and video creation software resulting in rapid proliferation of environments for creating media rich content.”

RealVision’s demo on NAB Stand SL5516 includes routing an HD video stream through the newly-released HSC10 HD SDI video input board to the HD10 board for processing and output – controlled with the OpenML 1.0-compatible RealVision RV Media Library.

“RealVision is proud to be a Khronos Member and has supported the development of OpenML for several years,” said John Sims, vice president of sales, RVU, Inc. “RealVision is showing three new integrated graphics and video controllers for the broadcast/3D graphics market with a one-of-a-kind, hardwire-connected, unified memory architecture; and fully utilizing the power of open, royalty free standards like OpenML to extend the capabilities of the hardware and further enabling our customers to add new features and functionality.”

The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs to enable the authoring and playback of 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.  Please go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos Announces PalmSource Joins as Contributor and Intel as New Adopter

PalmSource announces plans to make OpenGL ES available in Palm OS Cobalt;
Khronos invites application development community to review
OpenGL ES 1.1 strawman specification at GDC

March 22, 2004 – San Jose, California - GAME DEVELOPERS CONFERENCE– the Khronos group is pleased to announce that PalmSource® has joined the Khronos Group as a Contributing Member.  In a separate announcement today, PalmSource announced plans to make OpenGL ES available in future versions of Palm OS Cobalt, and to introduce a standardized graphics driver model for Palm OS Cobalt optimized for use with OpenGL ES-compliant chipsets.  This will allow chipset vendors to concentrate on a single, standardized set of acceleration specifications, and allows Palm OS Cobalt to easily take full advantage of the growing number of graphics chipsets that support the OpenGL ES API. Further, PalmSource will offer its own software implementation of the OpenGL ES API, allowing high performance graphics applications to run on the widest possible variety of Palm Powered devices.

“PalmSource is poised to be a significant contributor to the Khronos Group’s continuing efforts to establish open standards for advanced graphics and multi-media applications across leading mobile platforms like Palm OS,” said David Nagel, president and CEO of PalmSource, Inc. “We believe our support for the OpenGL ES graphics standard will accelerate market delivery of differentiated Palm Powered mobile entertainment products that extend the ease-of-use and flexibility of the Palm OS platform.”

Khronos was further delighted today to announce that Intel has become an OpenGL ES 1.0 Adopter to support the efforts of Khronos Group; and that additional new OpenGL ES 1.0 Adopters include QNX Software Systems, Silicon Studio, Magic Eyes Digital, among others.  The ever-widening Khronos membership further confirms OpenGL ES as the cross-platform, industry-standard API for state-of-the-art mobile graphics.
“We support the efforts of Khronos Group to create open standards like OpenGL ES,” said Rob McNair, Director of Marketing at Intel Corporation.  “This standard, along with others will help to make 3D graphics, games and other applications readily available on handheld devices.”

“OpenGL ES is the industry-standard, state-of-the-art graphics API that is becoming available across all key operating systems, including the Palm, Brew, Symbian, Linux and Java platforms,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and senior vice president of market development at 3Dlabs.  “Consistent, advanced graphics capabilities across many platforms is enabling a significant market for the mobile 3D graphics food chain – including application developers, graphics engine suppliers and development tool vendors.”

Khronos Group invites developers, editors or analysts with an interest learning more about OpenGL ES and the effect it is having on the mobile graphics industry to the “Second Annual OpenGL ES Forum,” Wednesday, March 24th at the Crowne Plaza Hotel San Jose, 282 Almaden at San Carlos (across from GDC). More details:  http://www.khronos.org/news/gdc_04_invite.html

1:30 PM - 3:00 PM -  News Conference with details on all the Member announcements
3:00 PM - 3:45 PM - “Meet the Members” Reception with demos
3:45 PM - 5:30 PM -  Developer Forum to discuss Open GL ES 1.1 (NDA only)

About the Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium founded in January 2000 by leading graphics and digital media companies.  It is focused on the creation and deployment of rich media through the development of open standard APIs that will enable the authoring and playback of 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.  Go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Award Winning OpenGL ES Mobile Graphics API Demonstrates Industry-wide Acceptance with over 12,000 downloads

March 17 – San Jose, California - GAME DEVELOPERS CONFERENCE– the Khronos group is pleased to announce that

We just passed 11,000 downloads, and won the GDC frontline Award!
The OpenGL ES API won the Game Developer Magazine 2003 Front Line Awards 
for Programming http://www.gdmag.com/flanomination.htm
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————

“JSR-184 is a higher-level, scene-graph API that can be i mplemented over the low-level OpenGL ES - and both groups cooperate to ensure that the two APIs work well together., “ said Jerry Evans, Sun.  “The work ongoing at JSR-231, defining bindings between Java and desktop OpenGL, will be adapted to cerate a Java binding to OpenGL ES. We regard it as a positive development that the Java community will have two ways of accessing OpenGL ES - either directly or through a scene-graph API - with complementary advantages in terms of ease of authoring, and flexibility.”

Khrons announces PalmSource beomaes a Contrinting Mmeber and Intena an Aoprte

Developerment comintiri invited to review OpergL 1.1 starwman specoiofiaction at GDC

Continuing widwencin membeship illustrates that opengles woil be the foundation graphicsa API across mutopkpe platforms and is enabling the mobile 3D instrya infrastraucture.
Everyon ei the food chain from Intel to samll boutiaque software devlpoers is ebaled.

Aplm is now in the plam, berw, symibaim, linux, java,

 

 

Public Availability of OpenGL ES Adoption & Conformance
http://www.khronos.org/news/releases/adopters_agreement.html 

 

The Khronos Group has released the OpenGL® ES 1.0 Adopter’s Package and Conformance Testing Program. The Adopter’s Package contains software and documentation intended to drive rapid evaluation, deployment and acceptance of the OpenGL ES API in embedded markets requiring state-of-the-art 3D graphics: official Conformance Tests for the OpenGL ES 1.0 API; an open source sample implementation of the OpenGL ES API created as a wrapper over a desktop implementation on Windows® and Linux® OS; and an executable copy of Hybrid Graphic’s Gerbera™ solution, supporting an OpenGL ES library for Windows. 

Access to the OpenGL ES Adopter Package is available to any interested company by executing the Khronos OpenGL ES 1.0 Adopter’s Agreement.  There is a one-time Adopter Membership fee of $1,500 that is waived for Khronos Promoter or Contributor Members.  The Conformance Testing Program is intended to promote consistent implementations of the API by many vendors across multiple platforms, and to create an objective definition of conformance for the API.  Full details of the Adopter’s Agreement, the Adopters Package and the OpenGL ES Conformance Testing Procedure can be found at http://www.khronos.org/opengles/become_opengles_adopter.html.

About the Khronos Group
The Khronos Group was founded in January 2000 by a number of leading graphics and digital media companies including 3Dlabs, ATI, Discreet, Evans & Sutherland, Intel, SGI and Sun Microsystems to promote the creation and deployment of rich media through the creation of open standard APIs to enable the authoring and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms & devices.  Go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

OpenGL ES Mobile Graphics API Demonstrates Industry-wide Acceptance

Hear numerous OpenGL ES product announcements by mobile media industry leaders at Khronos Group Press Conference on February 25 at 3:00pm at 3GSM in Cannes

February 24, 2004 – 3GSM, Cannes – the Khronos group is pleased to announce that many of its members and other key industry companies have announced the incorporation of the OpenGL ES 1.0 API into their mobile products.  Over a dozen Khronos Group Members will be on hand to talk about their new OpenGL ES implementations at:

Khronos Press and Developer Briefing - February 25, 2004, Cannes France
58 La Croisette – BP 155, Bridge room Carlton-Intercontinental Hotel.  3:00 – 3:30 PM Have Drinks & Meet the Members Reception; 3:30 – 5:00 PM Speakers and Demos. Map, detail and full descriptions of session content are available at: http://www.khronos.org/news/events.html

Hear about the new OpenGL ES Adopters Package and how it will drive rapid Adoption and Conformance

Confirmed Speakers at the session include: 3Dlabs, ARM, Bitboys, Esmertec, Fathammer, HI Corporation, Hybrid Graphics, Imagination Technologies, Motorola, Nokia, NVIDIA, Renesas, SK Telecom, Sun Microsystems, Texas Instruments.

Esmertec joins the Khronos Group as a Promoting Member and supports OpenGL ES as the 3D graphics API for its new wireless component J2ME runtime platform Jcap CLDC.
QUALCOMM Incorporated (Nasdaq: QCOM) has joined as a Contributing Member and is a pioneer and world leader of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) digital wireless technology and will be providing an integrated implementation of OpenGL ES accessible through the BREW™ API. 
Hybrid Graphics announced that they have released the world’s first OpenGL ES conformant software implementation with their Hybrid OpenGL ES API Framework for mobile platforms and embedded devices. It works in software only, multimedia accelerated and 3D hardware environments. The framework consists of an embedded OpenGL ES implementation of the Gerbera rasterizer, a testing suite, M3G (JSR 184) API as a wrapper, an implementation for rendering 2D vector graphics (SVG Tiny and Basic profiles). Hybrid has licensed its implementation to the Khronos Group as a part of the official OpenGL ES 1.0 Adopter’s Pack which is received by every OpenGL ES Adopter.
Renesas Technology Corp., the joint-venture semiconductor company established by Hitachi and Mitsubishi announced that they have joined the Khronos Group as Contributing Members, and that they will incorporate the Criterion RenderWare Mobile OpenGL ES middleware solution for SH-Mobile-based platforms. The OpenGL ES solution will be available to SH-Mobile licensees from 1st March 2004.
The Tao Group announced that they will use Criterion’s RenderWare Mobile to integrate OpenGL ES into their intent platform, for use on mobile and consumer electronic devices. intent is a binary portable, language-independent, high-performance multimedia platform that is now used by many of the world’s leading OEMs and mobile handset makers, such as Sony, Philips, and Sierra Wireless.
“With the integration of OpenGL ES, developing and delivering quality content across mobile devices will become a significantly easier process, said Paddy Byers, Tao Group”
Fathammer is pleased to announce the new major release of their advanced mobile game development platform and toolkit, X-Forge2.0.

- TI and ___ announce ____

“Fathammer’s premier product for professional mobile game developers, X-Forge 2.0, includes native support for OpenGL,” said Matti Airas, CEO Fathammer. “We believe that supporting open APIs is the best method to create robust game development tools for today’s mobile handsets and future 3D hardware accelerated devices.”
 

Public Availability of OpenGL ES Adoption & Conformance
http://www.khronos.org/news/releases/adopters_agreement.html 

The Khronos Group has released the OpenGL® ES 1.0 Adopter’s Package and Conformance Testing Program. The Adopter’s Package contains software and documentation intended to drive rapid evaluation, deployment and acceptance of the OpenGL ES API in embedded markets requiring state-of-the-art 3D graphics: official Conformance Tests for the OpenGL ES 1.0 API; an open source sample implementation of the OpenGL ES API created as a wrapper over a desktop implementation on Windows® and Linux® OS; and an executable copy of Hybrid Graphic’s Gerbera™ solution, supporting an OpenGL ES library for Windows. 

Access to the OpenGL ES Adopter Package is available to any interested company by executing the Khronos OpenGL ES 1.0 Adopter’s Agreement.  There is a one-time Adopter Membership fee of $1,500 that is waived for Khronos Promoter or Contributor Members.  The Conformance Testing Program is intended to promote consistent implementations of the API by many vendors across multiple platforms, and to create an objective definition of conformance for the API.  Full details of the Adopter’s Agreement, the Adopters Package and the OpenGL ES Conformance Testing Procedure can be found at http://www.khronos.org/opengles/become_opengles_adopter.html.

“The rapid deployment of the OpenGL ES 1.0 Adopter’s Package demonstrates Khronos’ effectiveness as an industry forum in creating specifications, together with tools and awareness, to drive adoption and the growth of new market opportunities,” said Neil Trevett, senior vice president of market development at 3Dlabs, president of the Khronos Group and chairman of the OpenGL ES Working Group.  “The Khronos Conformance Tests will encourage high quality OpenGL ES implementations across multiple platforms, and we encourage ISVs to seek out conformant platforms to minimize their development and porting costs.”

“We’re excited to see the release of the OpenGL ES 1.0 conformance test and procedures,” stated Shawn Underwood, Director of Marketing for visualization at SGI.  “These will ensure application developers can depend on the integrity and robustness of products featuring the OpenGL ES logo.”

“——-,” commented——-, executive vice president of sales and marketing at———.  “We believe that the OpenGL ES API is going to be the standard cross-platform embedded graphics API of choice, and so is the obvious selection for ___________.”

“——- active participation in the Khronos Group has enabled a leadership position in delivering standards-based graphics to the mobile industry, resulting in————,” said————-, director of marketing,—————-.

“Open standard, cross-platform 3D graphics will be critical to the next generation of handheld devices and we have leveraged our experience to develop————- -—————-designed to accelerate OpenGL ES.”

“The OpenGL ES API ushers in a new era for mobile graphics,” said

 

About the Khronos Group
The Khronos Group was founded in January 2000 by a number of leading graphics and digital media companies including 3Dlabs, ATI, Discreet, Evans & Sutherland, Intel, SGI and Sun Microsystems to promote the creation and deployment of rich media through the creation of open standard APIs to enable the authoring and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms & devices.  Go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

 

Khronos Member Hybrid Graphics Delivers World’s First OpenGL ES API Software Implementation

See Hybrid demonstrate their OpenGL ES based product at a Khronos Press & Developer Open House on February 25, 2004 at 3GSM in Cannes, France

February 17 2004 – 3GSM CONGRESS & EXHIBITION, Cannes France:  The Khronos Group is pleased to announce that the Hybrid OpenGL® ES API Framework is the first software implementation of this industry-leading API to successfully complete the conformance testing process defined by Khronos, and is the first OpenGL ES software library able to demonstrate conformance with the official open standard for embedded graphics.  As a member of Khronos, Hybrid has been an active participant in defining the OpenGL ES API standard and has licensed its implementation to the Khronos Group as a part of the official OpenGL ES 1.0 Adopter’s Pack which is received by every OpenGL ES Adopter.

“OpenGL ES is the key to growing the mobile content market and our high-performance implementation brings 3D graphics to handsets without any additional hardware modifications,” says Harri Holopainen, CTO of Hybrid Graphics. “We are glad to see leading game engine and middleware vendors targeting OpenGL ES and our software implementation now delivers a conformant API in a wide range of devices; enabling advanced graphics applications to run everywhere to create significant opportunities for content developers.”

About Hybrid OpenGL ES API Framework
The Hybrid OpenGL ES API Framework brings advanced 3D graphics core technology into mobile phones and embedded devices. Integrated by device manufacturers and embedded platform vendors, the Framework supports software-only, multimedia hardware or 3D graphics hardware acceleration depending on the platform’s capabilities. The API Framework has been fully tested with leading middleware and content engine offerings and ships with extensive testing and verification tools.  Hybrid offers support, integration and maintenance services for device deployment and to ensure pain-free content development.  The Hybrid OpenGL ES API Framework is available for licensing now, and has already been licensed by major mobile phone vendors.

Attend the OpenGL ES Press Conference at 3GSM on Wednesday February 25, 2004 - 15:00
Hear the latest standardization, infrastructure and product updates from Hybrid Graphics And other leading Khronos Members at the Intercontinental Hotel in Cannes, France.  Map, detail and full descriptions of session content are available at: http://www.khronos.org/news/events.html

“Conformance testing is vital to ensure that the OpenGL ES API provides a reliable and stable graphics capability across a wide variety of devices and markets – enabling ISVs to reach the largest number of users with the minimum of effort,” said Neil Trevett, senior vice president of market development at 3Dlabs, president of the Khronos Group and chairman of the OpenGL ES Working Group.  “I congratulate Hybrid on bringing the first conformant software implementation of OpenGL ES to market, and I applaud them for setting the bar with a high-quality implementation that will demonstrate to the industry that the OpenGL ES logo is synonymous with reliable, state-of-the-art graphics.”

OpenGL ES 1.0 Adopter’s Package and Conformance Testing Program
Khronos is now accepting OpenGL ES Adopting Members.  The Adopter’s Package contains software and documentation intended to drive rapid evaluation, deployment and acceptance of the OpenGL ES API in embedded markets requiring state-of-the-art 3D graphics: official conformance tests for the OpenGL ES 1.0 API; an open source sample implementation of the OpenGL ES API created as a wrapper over a desktop implementation on Windows® and Linux® OS; and an executable copy of The Hybrid OpenGL ES API Framework library for Windows. 

About Hybrid Graphics
Hybrid Graphics, Ltd is a leading developer of graphics technology solutions for mobile devices.  Founded in 1994, Hybrid has a decade of experience in developing 3D technology for various platforms. The company has a strategic distribution partnership with Criterion Software, the leading 3D middleware vendor. Hybrid has shipped several embedded 3D graphics solutions, which have been deployed in mass-market consumer devices. Among Hybrid’s customers and partners are ATI, Ericsson Mobile Platforms, Fathammer, Futuremark, Intel and Sony Online Entertainment. Hybrid is located in Helsinki, Finland. Please visit http://www.hybrid.fi for more information.

About the Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium focused on the development and deployment of OpenGL ES and OpenML®; royalty-free, open standard APIs that enable authoring and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices.  Go to http://www.khronos.org for more information.

Leading Mobile Industry Leaders Esmertec, QUALCOMM and Renesas Technology Join Khronos Group

See OpenGL ES product demonstrations and meet Khronos Members at a 
Press & Developer Open House on February 25, 2004 at 3GSM in Cannes, France

February 17, 2004 – 3GSM CONGRESS & EXHIBITION, Cannes France:  The Khronos Group is pleased to announce that Esmertec, a leading independent software company focusing on Java™ solutions and technologies for mass-market devices, has selected OpenGL ES® as a key 3D graphics API for its new wireless component J2ME runtime platform Jcap™ CLDC, and has joined as the newest Promoting Member in order to contribute to the ongoing development of the OpenGL ES specification.  Also joining today as new Contributor level Members are QUALCOMM and Renesas Technology.  QUALCOMM (NASDAQ:QCOM) is a leading designer and supplier of CDMA chipsets and system software, and their digital and wireless innovations have transformed cell phones into small, sophisticated computers running Internet and multimedia software.  Renesas Technology is one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world, and designs and manufactures highly integrated semiconductor system solutions for mobile, automotive and PC/AV markets.  Renesas’ SH-Mobile is acclaimed to be the world-leading application processor for the mobile market. These industry leading new members will further the momentum of OpenGL ES, which defines subset profiles of OpenGL® and brings advanced 3D graphics to a wide range of embedded systems; and OpenML 1.0 which enables developers to easily integrate video, audio and graphics capabilities into their application suites. 

Attend an OpenGL ES Press Conference on Wednesday February 25, 2004 - 15:00-17:00
Hear new announcements and the latest standardization, infrastructure and product updates from leading Khronos Members at the Intercontinental Hotel in Cannes, France.  Map, detail and full descriptions of session content are available at: http://www.khronos.org/news/events.html

“OpenGL ES marks a significant milestone in bringing rich graphic experience to consumers’ mobile phones and we look forward to further contributing to the development and adoption of the standard,” said Alain Blancquart, CEO of Esmertec.  “Rich graphics are a key feature of Jcap™ CLDC, Esmertec’s latest wireless component enabled runtime platform; delivering dynamic and personalized service experience and interface branding to mobile phones.  We believe the consumer appetite for a dynamic user experience is insatiable and we are committed to providing such benefits to mass market handsets.”

“This announcement illustrates how OpenGL ES continues to gain significant industry momentum in all sectors of the mobile industry food-chain – enabling Khronos to promote a complete infrastructure around OpenGL ES for handheld 3D,” said Neil Trevett, senior vice president of market development at 3Dlabs, secretary of the Khronos Group and chairman of the OpenGL ES Working Group.  “Through our attention to API conformance testing, and by bringing a widely accepted 3D API standard rapidly to market, Khronos is performing an effective role in minimizing the platform permutations faced by 3D application developers.”

“Joining the Khronos group allows Renesas Technology to leverage the popularity of OpenGL ES and partner the technology with SH-Mobile to produce feature-rich multimedia devices cost effectively with reduced development time,” said Mr. Masao Nagatomo, General Manager of SOC Div. MCU & SOC Business Unit at Renesas Technology. “OpenGL ES will enable our SH-Mobile Consortium members to easily access the high performance of the SH-Mobile architecture in creating the new generation of applications for mobile terminals.”

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium focused on the development and deployment of OpenGL® ES and OpenML®; royalty-free, open standard APIs that enable authoring and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. 

OpenGL® ES 1.0 Adopter’s Package and Conformance Testing Program
Khronos is now accepting OpenGL ES Adopting Members.  The Adopter’s Package contains software and documentation intended to drive rapid evaluation, deployment and acceptance of the OpenGL ES API in embedded markets requiring state-of-the-art 3D graphics: official Conformance Tests for the OpenGL ES 1.0 API; an open source sample implementation of the OpenGL ES API created as a wrapper over a desktop implementation on Windows® and Linux® OS; and an executable copy of Hybrid Graphic’s Gerbera™ solution, supporting an OpenGL ES library for Windows. 

About the Khronos Group
The Khronos Group was founded in January 2000 by a number of leading graphics and digital media companies including 3Dlabs, ATI, Discreet, Evans & Sutherland, Intel, SGI and Sun Microsystems to promote the creation and deployment of rich media through the creation of open standard APIs to enable the authoring and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms & devices.  Go to http://www.khronos.org
for more information.