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 grows support for open standards, 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/.

Vivante GPU IP Chosen By Leading Mobile Multimedia SoC Provider

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™ The Total Solution for OpenMAX IL Development

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

Japanese Translation (pdf)

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 Specification Supporting Latest Generation Programmable Graphic Hardware

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 Functio

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 for Mobile Rich-Media and Graphics Application Portability

News Release For Further Information: Khronos Group Marketing Director Elizabeth Riegel +1 (415) 869-8627 (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Khronos Releases OpenKODE 1.0 Royalty-Free Standard for Mobile Rich-Media and Graphics Application Portability

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, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenWF, glFX, 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 Group Releases OpenMAX AL 1.0 and OpenSL ES 1.0 Specifications for Embedded Media and Audio Processing

News Release For Further Information: Neil Trevett Khronos President +1 (408) 464-7053 
ntrevett@nvidia.com

Khronos Group Releases OpenMAX AL 1.0 and OpenSL ES 1.0 Specifications for Embedded Media and Audio Processing

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 http://www.khronos.org.

Khronos, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenWF, glFX, 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 Group Gains Diverse New Members and Broadens Standards-based Ecosystem

News Release For Further Information: Elizabeth Riegel Khronos Group Public Relations +1 (888) 222-1899 elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

Khronos Group Gains Diverse New Members and Broadens Standards-based Ecosystem

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: http://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: http://www.ardites.com.

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.

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

News Release For Further Information: Elizabeth Riegel Khronos Group Public Relations +1 (888) 222-1899 elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

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.

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.

SoftBank Mobile Joins the Khronos Group

News Release For Further Information: Elizabeth Riegel Khronos Group Public Relations +1 (888) 222-1899 elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

Khronos Group Japanese Business Manager Hitoshi Kasai +81(422) 47-5319 khronos@miacis.com

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, 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.

SOFTBANK MOBILE Adopts OpenKODE to Provide Rich Media Acceleration in its New Handset Platform

News Release For Further Information: Khronos Group Executive Director Elizabeth Riegel +1 (888) 222-1899 elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

Khronos Group Japanese Business Manager Hitoshi Kasai +81(422) 47-5319 khronos@miacis.com

SOFTBANK MOBILE Adopts OpenKODE to Provide Rich Media Acceleration in its New Handset Platform

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, 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.  SOFTBANK, its name and logos are registered marks and/or trademarks of SoftBank Corporation in Japan and other countries. POP-i is a trademark of SOFTBANK MOBILE Corporation. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

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

News Release For Further Information: Elizabeth Riegel Khronos Group Public Relations +1 (707) 994-7755 elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

Web3D Consortium Rita Turkowski +1 (650) 722-0659 rita.turkowski@web3d.org

The Khronos Group and Web3D Consortium Enter Liaison to Align Standards Development

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.

Khronos Group Initiates New Working Groups, Gains New Membership and Launches COLLADA Contest

News Release
For Further Information:
Elizabeth Riegel
Khronos Group Public Relations
+1 (707) 994-7755
elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

Khronos Group Initiates New Working Groups, Gains New Membership and Launches COLLADA Contest

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.

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 Finalized OpenGL ES 2.0 Specification

News Release
For Further Information:
Elizabeth Riegel
Khronos Group Public Relations
+1 740 649-7755
elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

Khronos Releases Finalized OpenGL ES 2.0 Specification

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.

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 Official Conformance Tests and Open Source Sample Implementation for OpenVG 1.0

News Release
For Further Information:
Elizabeth Riegel
Khronos Group Public Relations
+1 740 649-7755
elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

Khronos Releases Official Conformance Tests and Open Source Sample Implementation for OpenVG 1.0

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, 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 OpenKODE 1.0 Specification for Mobile Rich Media Applications

News Release
For Further Information:
Elizabeth Riegel
Khronos Group Public Relations
+1 740 649-7755
elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

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, 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 New OpenMAX IL 1.1 Standard for Enhanced Streaming Media Portability

News Release
For Further Information:
Elizabeth Riegel
Khronos Group Public Relations
+1 740 649-7755
elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

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, 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 Invites Public Review of OpenKODE 1.0 Specification Draft

News Release
For Further Information:
Elizabeth Riegel
Khronos Group Public Relations
+1 740 649-7755
elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

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.

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.

 

OpenGL 2.1 Specification Publicly Released

News Release
For Further Information:
Elizabeth Riegel
Khronos Group Public Relations
+1 740 649-7755
elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

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, 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.

 

COLLADA Open Standard for 3D Asset Interchange Gains Significant Industry Momentum

News Release
For Further Information:
Elizabeth Riegel
Khronos Group Public Relations
+1 740 649-7755
elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

COLLADA Open Standard for 3D Asset Interchange Gains Significant Industry 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.

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.

 

OpenGL ARB to Pass Control of OpenGL Specification to Khronos Group

News Release
For Further Information:
Elizabeth Riegel
Khronos Group Public Relations
+1 740 649-7755
elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

OpenGL ARB to Pass Control of OpenGL Specification to Khronos Group

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.

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.

 

Apple, Dell, Google and Others Join the Khronos Group

News Release
For Further Information:
Elizabeth Riegel
Khronos Group Public Relations
+1 740 649-7755
elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

Apple, Dell, Google and Others Join the Khronos Group

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.

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.

 

Bellagio OpenMAX IL open source sample implementation for Linux lets developers create OpenMAX multimedia components

News Release
For Further Information:
Elizabeth Riegel
Khronos Group Public Relations
+1 707 350 1800
elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

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.

Khronos, 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. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

 

COLLADA gains momentum as standard for exchanging 3D models between content and game creation tools

News Release
For Further Information:
Elizabeth Riegel
Khronos Group Public Relations
+1 707 350 1800
elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

COLLADA gains momentum as the standard for exchanging 3D models between content and game creation tools

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.

Khronos, 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. Google Earth and Sketchup are registered trademarks of Google, Inc. Softimage is a registered trademark of Avid Technology, Inc. 3ds Max and Maya are registered trademarks of Autodesk, Inc. Houdini is a registered trademark of Side Effects Software. Unreal is a registered trademark of Epic Games. PlayStation is a registered trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.  All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

 

Khronos Announces Release of COLLADA 1.4 and New Members Emdigo, Feeling Software and Softimage

News Release
For Further Information:
Elizabeth Riegel
Khronos Group Public Relations
+1 707 350 1800
elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

Khronos Announces Release of COLLADA 1.4 and New Members Emdigo, Feeling Software and Softimage

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.

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

News Release    
For Further Information:
Elizabeth Riegel
Khronos Group Public Relations
+1 707 350 1800
elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

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.

 

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.

 

Intel Joins Khronos Group as a Promoting Member

News Release    
For Further Information:
Elizabeth Riegel
Khronos Group Public Relations
+1 707 350 1800
elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

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 codecs

News Release        
For Further Information:
Elizabeth Riegel
Khronos Group Public Relations
+1 707 994 7755
elizabeth (at) goldstandardgroup.com

Khronos Releases OpenMAX DL 1.0 Specification for Media Codec Portability

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.