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

Khronos to Create New Open Standard for Computer Vision

Open call for contributions and industry participation in initiative to create acceleration API for computer vision applications and libraries; Working group meetings commencing in January 2012

13th December, 2011 – SIGGRAPH ASIA, Hong Kong – The Khronos™ Group today announced a new initiative to create an open, royalty-free standard for cross platform acceleration of computer vision applications.  In response to requests and proposals from members, Khronos has created a vision working group to develop a hardware acceleration API using the proven Khronos development process and aiming for a first public release within 12 months.  Any interested company is welcome to join Khronos to make contributions, influence the direction of the specification and gain early access to draft specifications before public release.  The vision working group will commence work during January 2012.  More details on joining Khronos can be found at http://www.khronos.org/members/ or emailing .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Computer vision has become an essential component of many modern applications including gesture tracking, smart video surveillance, automatic driver assistance, biometrics, computational photography, augmented reality, visual inspection, robotics and more.  Many modern consumer compute devices, from smartphones to desktop computers, can be capable computer vision systems but require hardware accelerated vision algorithms to work in real-time. Consequently, multiple hardware vendors have developed proprietary accelerated computer vision libraries leading to market fragmentation. The Khronos vision working group will drive industry consensus to create a cross-platform API standard to enable hardware vendors to implement and optimize accelerated computer vision algorithms.  More details on the vision working group processes and goals are here: http://www.khronos.org/vision.

The Khronos vision API will be able to accelerate high-level libraries, such as the popular OpenCV open source vision library, or be used by applications directly. A strong focus of the working group will be on providing computer vision on mobile and embedded systems and enabling acceleration on a wide variety of computing architectures including CPUs, GPUs and DSPs.  The vision API will also explore interoperability with existing Khronos standards for camera control, video processing, compute acceleration and graphics rendering.

“Computer vision will be central to enabling consumers to use and interact with their computing devices in compelling and magical ways - but this emerging market opportunity needs a firm foundation of cross-platform vision acceleration,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group.  “We invite any company with an interest or expertise in vision processing to join us to help build a lasting standard that can be broadly adopted across multiple devices and market segments.”

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, WebCL, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenKODE™, StreamInput 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.

 

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Khronos, StreamInput, WebGL, COLLADA, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenWF, OpenSL ES, OpenMAX, OpenMAX AL, OpenMAX IL and OpenMAX DL are trademarks and WebCL is a certification mark of the Khronos Group Inc. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL and OpenML are registered trademarks and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics International used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

Khronos Releases OpenCL 1.2 Specification

Industry leaders cooperate to evolve cross-platform open standard for heterogeneous parallel programming; Backwards compatible with OpenCL 1.1 to preserve code investment; Comprehensive OpenCL 1.2 conformance tests available

November 15th 2011 – SC11 - Seattle, WA – The Khronos™ Group today announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL™ 1.2 specification, the latest update to the open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors.  Released eighteen months after OpenCL 1.1, this new version provides enhanced performance and functionality for parallel programming in a backwards compatible specification that is the result of cooperation by over thirty industry-leading companies.  Khronos has updated and expanded its comprehensive OpenCL conformance test suite to ensure that implementations of the new specification provide a complete and reliable platform for cross-platform application development.  The OpenCL 1.2 specifications, online reference pages and reference cards are available at www.khronos.org/opencl/.

“The OpenCL working group is listening carefully to feedback from the developer and middleware community to provide significant and timely functionality for heterogeneous computing in this cross vendor open standard,” said Neil Trevett, chair of the OpenCL working group, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA.  “The OpenCL working group is also broadening its membership and has growing representation from the mobile and embedded industries and is enabling innovative devices such as FPGAs to be driven through OpenCL.”

OpenCL 1.2 enables significantly enhanced parallel programming flexibility, functionality and performance through many updates and additions including:

 
• Device partitioning - enabling applications to partition a device into sub-devices to directly control  work assignment to particular compute units, reserve a part of the device for use for high priority/latency-sensitive tasks, or effectively use shared hardware resources such as a cache;
 
• Separate compilation and linking of objects - providing the capabilities and flexibility of traditional compilers enabling the creation of libraries of OpenCL programs for other programs to link to;
 
• Enhanced image support - including added support for 1D images and 1D & 2D image arrays. Also, the OpenGL sharing extension now enables an OpenCL image to be created from OpenGL 1D textures and 1D & 2D texture arrays;
 
• Built-in kernels represent the capabilities of specialized or non-programmable hardware and associated firmware, such as video encoder/decoders and digital signal processors, enabling these custom devices to be driven from and integrated closely with the OpenCL framework;
 
• DX9 Media Surface Sharing - enables efficient sharing between OpenCL and DirectX 9 or DXVA media surfaces;
 
• DX11 Surface Sharing - for seamless sharing between OpenCL and DirectX 11 surfaces.

Working Group Member Support
“AMD promotes industry standards like OpenCL 1.2 that encourage developer freedom and creativity,” said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president, AMD Fusion Experience Program. “In addition to being one of the leading contributors to the OpenCL working group and specifications, AMD Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) and GPUs are the perfect platforms to take advantage of the potential of OpenCL – for developers and end-users.”

“Having worked with our Khronos partners in the evolution of OpenCL we are pleased to support the announcement of the latest version of the standard," said James McNiven, vice president, compute sub-systems, processor division, ARM.  “We believe the vision of energy efficient heterogeneous compute subsystems can only be realized through industry collaboration and standards. ARM remains committed to supporting OpenCL across both CPU and GPU technology and helping our partners deliver high-performance compute systems that leverage ARM® Mali™ GPU and Cortex™ processor technology.”

“Intel is encouraged by the progress of the OpenCL specification and proud to be an OpenCL adopter and contributor to the OpenCL 1.2 release”, said Bill Savage, vice president and general manager of the Developer Products Division of Intel’s Software and Services Group. “OpenCL 1.2 promises better performance and more flexibility in software design for developers targeting current and future Intel Platforms.”

“The existence of an unified programming interface for multi-core platforms is becoming a crucial element for boosting the productivity of software engineers.” said Satoshi Miki, Founder and CEO, Fixstars Corporation. “With the release of the OpenCL 1.2 specification, I am very excited for the increased flexibility that it brings to multi-core programming. My hope is for many hardware vendors to support this new specification to allow for further innovations that can only come about from taking full advantage of the multi-core architecture.”

OpenCL Session at SC11, Seattle November 14-18th 2011
There is an OpenCL BOF “Birds of a Feather” Meeting on Wednesday 16th, 5:30– 7PM in Room TCC 101 at SC11, where attendees are invited to meet OpenCL implementers and developers and learn more about the new OpenCL 1.2 specification.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, WebCL, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenKODE™, StreamInput 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.

 

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Khronos, StreamInput, WebGL, COLLADA, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenWF, OpenSL ES, OpenMAX, OpenMAX AL, OpenMAX IL and OpenMAX DL are trademarks and WebCL is a certification mark of the Khronos Group Inc. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL and OpenML are registered trademarks and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics International used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

The Khronos Group is pleased to invite Universities and Training Centers to Submit Open Course Content for Free KITE

The Khronos™ Group www.khronos.org, maintainers of open standards such as OpenGL®, OpenCL™, WebGL™ and many other universal graphics, parallel computing and mutlimedia APIs for over 10 years, is very excited to extend this formal invitation to you for early participation in our soon-to-be-announced KITE initiative.

Khronos standards have existed for over a decade and we are proud to begin the next steps in outreach – education.

KITE is a cooperative effort between the Khronos Group, its individual members and worldwide educational institutions to provide free, web-based resources and Wiki hosting of Khronos-approved educational materials for teachers and students. We are building a repository of open courseware from universities and colleges worldwide and invite your participation.

Designed to facilitate communications and enable project collaboration between educators, students, researchers and Khronos Group members, KITE will offer reference materials and coursework covering all of the Khronos Group programming solutions, including its acclaimed OpenGL family of desktop and mobile 3D graphics APIs, OpenCL heterogeneous computing, OpenMAX™ multimedia frameworks and many more.

Due to your involvement as a leading member of the web community of CG educators, professionals and companies we offer you this early opportunity to become join us in this exciting initiative. We are pleased to offer marketing resources to publicize your involvement in KITE when we launch in a few weeks. Let us know if you are interested.

Thank you in advance for your consideration and we hope you choose to participate in this exciting education initiative.

Benefits to Educators

Educator benefits will include:

• free online listings in the KITE directory as well as sharing open courseware
• a reduction in necessary prep time for Khronos-related materials
• peer-reviewed courseware from colleagues
• sharing real-world teaching experiences
• leveraging of Khronos members to find industry placements
• internships and sale prices on premium courseware

While all teaching institutions are invited to submit content for review (and if approved to have upload and sharing privileges), a teaching institution must be a Khronos Academic Member to receive enhanced promotion of their coursework and to have access to the “behind the scenes” communications on the KITE website.

Benefits to Students

Students all over the world will have access to a wide range of resources, including

• “Study Hall” with industry materials and forums for courseware discussions with lecturers
• “The Quad” for online meet-ups for students to discuss projects and news
• a notice board to find internships, competitions and projects offered by Khronos Members
• “Roving Reporter” opportunities to report back on industry activities and to share demo videos and interviews.

Details on Course Content Submissions

If you have course content, reference materials, and/or presentations and are willing to help us build a world-class facility to share this with others interested or involved in open standards, please contact:

Ilana Welch
Gold Standard Group
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Khronos Enriches Cross-Platform 3D Graphics with 
Release of OpenGL 4.2 Specification

New open API specification available immediately; Developer feedback integrated into wide-ranging performance and functionality enhancements

August 8th, 2011 – Vancouver, SIGGRAPH 2011 – The Khronos™ Group today announced the immediate release of the OpenGL® 4.2 specification, bringing the very latest graphics functionality to the most advanced and widely adopted cross-platform 2D and 3D graphics API (application programming interface).  OpenGL 4.2 integrates developer feedback and continues the rapid evolution of this royalty-free specification while maintaining full backwards compatibility - enabling applications to incrementally use new features, while portably accessing state-of-the-art graphics processing unit (GPU) functionality across diverse operating systems and platforms.

The OpenGL 4.2 specification has been defined by the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) working group at Khronos, and includes the GLSL 4.20 update to the OpenGL Shading Language.  The OpenGL 4.2 specification contains new features that extend functionality available to developers and enables increased application performance.  The full specification is available for immediate download at http://www.opengl.org/registry.

New functionality in the OpenGL 4.2 specification includes:

 
• enabling shaders with atomic counters and load/store/atomic read-modify-write operations to a single level of a texture.  These capabilities can be combined, for example, to maintain a counter at each pixel in a buffer object for single-rendering-pass order-independent transparency;
 
• capturing GPU-tessellated geometry and drawing multiple instances of the result of a transform feedback to enable complex objects to be efficiently repositioned and replicated;
 
• modifying an arbitrary subset of a compressed texture, without having to re-download the whole texture to the GPU for significant performance improvements;
 
• packing multiple 8 and 16 bit values into a single 32-bit value for efficient shader processing with significantly reduced  memory storage and bandwidth, especially useful when transferring data between shader stages.

“OpenGL 4.2 has integrated feedback from developers that are shipping significant OpenGL-based applications and games, making for a faster, more capable API which will continue to evolve to meet market needs,” said Barthold Lichtenbelt, working group chair of the OpenGL ARB and director of Tegra graphics at NVIDIA. “As with previous OpenGL releases NVIDIA is committed to ship productized implementations as rapidly as possible after specification release. In fact, NVIDIA released production OpenGL 4.2 drivers today, enabling developers to immediately leverage this new functionality on NVIDIA GPUs.” (Note: for more information, please visit http://developer.nvidia.com/opengl).
 
“AMD plans to release our OpenGL 4.2 beta drivers with the publication of the OpenGL 4.2 specification,” said Ben Bar-Haim, corporate vice president, AMD Software Development (NYSE: AMD). “AMD strongly supports industry standards and congratulates the Khronos Group on their success in the rapid evolution of OpenGL and its other open standards that enable brilliant computing experiences.”

Learn about OpenGL 4.2 and Khronos APIs at SIGGRAPH 2011 BOF Meetings

API	Date	Time	Location
WebGL	Wed, August 10th	10AM - Noon	Convention Centre, Room 122 (West Building)
OpenCL	Wed, August 10th	1:30PM - 3:30PM	Pan Pacific Hotel, Crystal Ballroom B&C
OpenGL	Wed, Aug 10th	4PM - 6PM	Pan Pacific Hotel, Crystal Ballroom B&C
OpenGL ES/Mobile	Thu, Aug 11th	10AM-Noon	Convention Centre, Room 122 (West Building)
COLLADA	Thu, Aug 11th	2PM - 4PM	Convention Centre, Room 122 (West Building)

Visit Khronos at booth #663 and Khronos Press & Educators Open House at booth #764 to see Khronos members display Khronos Group-developed technology in action.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, WebCL™, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, StreamInput™ 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.

 

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

StreamInput creating open standard for advanced sensor processing; WebCL defining companion API to WebGL to bring parallel computation to the Web

August 8th, 2011 – Vancouver, SIGGRAPH 2011 – In its 10th year of operation the Khronos™ Group today widened its call for participation in its two newest working groups: StreamInput™ and WebCL™.  StreamInput is defining a cross-platform API for advanced sensor processing and user interaction, and WebCL is creating JavaScript bindings to OpenCL™ to enable heterogeneous parallel computing in HTML5 Web browsers.  Any interested company is welcome to join Khronos to make contributions, influence the direction of specifications and gain early access to draft standards before public release for any Khronos working group.  More details on joining Khronos can be found at http://www.khronos.org/members/ or by emailing .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

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

The WebCL working group is working to define a JavaScript binding to the Khronos OpenCL standard for heterogeneous parallel computing.  WebCL will enable Web applications to harness GPU and multi-core CPU parallel processing from within a Web browser, enabling significant acceleration of applications such as image and video processing and advanced physics for WebGL games.  WebCL is being developed in close cooperation with the Web community and has the potential to extend the capabilities of HTML5 browsers to accelerate computationally intensive and rich visual computing applications.  More information about WebCL, including links to prototype open source implementations from Nokia and Samsung, is here: http://www.khronos.org/webcl/.

“Advances in computational power on a wide range of platforms and devices are greatly accelerating sensor innovation from 9-axis motion positional sensors, to depth ranging cameras.  StreamInput will drive the market adoption of advanced sensors by enabling input fusion innovation under a common API that provides portability to application developers,” said Neil Trevett, president of Khronos and vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA. “WebCL is the natural extension of the WebGL and OpenCL work already underway at Khronos and continues the trend of evolving HTML5 not only to support advanced Web experiences but also to become a full-fledged application platform with access to advanced device capabilities.”

“AMD is highly supportive of the WebCL initiative to deliver compute capabilities to Web browsing,” said Suki Samra, Senior Director, Design Engineering (NYSE: AMD). “AMD strongly supports industry standards, and as a leading provider of OpenCL and OpenGL solutions on AMD’s GPUs and APUs believes that WebCL will be a welcome companion to the newly released WebGL standard.”

“We are delighted the Nokia initiative to standardize WebCL has been accepted by Khronos. The developer feedback about our WebCL prototype for Firefox has been positive, and we are committed to work with the open-source community to align it with the developing WebCL standard “, says Jyri Huopaniemi, director, media technologies, Nokia Research Center.

“SoftKinetic is excited to contribute to this standard initiative which will facilitate the adoption of new input devices such as depth sensing cameras.  It is important to facilitate content developer’s workflow as much as possible by abstracting these devices behind a robust and standard API", said Erik Krzeslo, chief strategy officer. "SoftKinetic products will greatly benefit from all what Stream Input offers in terms of simplicity, portability and cross-sensors interactions.”

Learn about Khronos APIs at SIGGRAPH 2011 BOF Meetings

API	Date	Time	Location
WebGL	Wed, August 10th	10AM - Noon	Convention Centre, Room 122 (West Building)
OpenCL	Wed, August 10th	1:30PM - 3:30PM	Pan Pacific Hotel, Crystal Ballroom B&C
OpenGL	Wed, Aug 10th	4PM - 6PM	Pan Pacific Hotel, Crystal Ballroom B&C
OpenGL ES/Mobile	Thu, Aug 11th	10AM-Noon	Convention Centre, Room 122 (West Building)
COLLADA	Thu, Aug 11th	2PM - 4PM	Convention Centre, Room 122 (West Building)

About The Khronos Group
  The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, WebCL™, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, StreamInput™ 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.

 

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

Khronos to Create New Open Standard for 
Advanced Device and Sensor Input

12th April, 2011 – San Francisco, CA – The Khronos™ Group today announced a new initiative to create an open, platform-independent, royalty-free standard for accessing a wide diversity of advanced input devices including depth cameras, motion-tracking sensors, touch-screens and haptic devices.  In response to requests and proposals from multiple members, Khronos has created a ‘StreamInput’ working group that TransGaming Inc. has offered to initially chair.  This royalty-free standard will be developed under the proven Khronos development process aiming for a first public release within 12 months.  Any interested company is welcome to join Khronos to make contributions, influence the direction of the specification and gain early access to draft specifications before public release.  The StreamInput working group will commence work during April 2011.  More details on joining Khronos can be found at http://www.khronos.org/members/ or emailing .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

The Khronos StreamInput working group will drive industry consensus to create a cross-platform API to provide applications with both high-level semantic input as well as low-level device management capabilities, enabling significant innovations by sensor and device manufacturers - while simplifying portable application development. The new API will support a general-purpose framework for consistently handling new generation sensors and traditional input devices such as keyboards, mice, track pads and joysticks.  The API will also provide system-wide sensor synchronization for advanced multi-sensor applications such as augmented reality, and will use Khronos’ proven extension mechanisms to enable new types of input devices to be easily added and supported.

"The StreamInput working group already has a strong variety of supporters both inside and outside of Khronos, and we hope that many other companies will join us to help build a lasting standard that can be broadly adopted across multiple devices and market segments," said Gavriel State, founder and CTO at TransGaming Inc.  "TransGaming has extensive experience in handling diverse input devices across many platforms – we have brought our real-world experience to bear on initiating a general input solution that will benefit the entire industry."

"Natural and intuitive human-machine interfaces, in particular using 3D depth sensing and gesture recognition technologies, are rapidly being adopted by developers and customers in consumer electronics and professional markets," said Eric Krzeslo, chief strategy officer at Softkinetic. "Softkinetic has been a pioneer in that space and welcomes Khronos’ initiative to standardize common APIs across the natural interface continuum and traditional interfaces, to give developers a solid foundation for building re-usable applications. We look forward to bring our experience in 3D cameras hardware, 3D gesture recognition software, and applications to this initiative."

"Input devices now range from simple keyboards, through 9-axis motion positional sensors, to depth ranging cameras with sophisticated image processing.  A robust input API is essential to drive the market adoption of advanced sensors by enabling input fusion innovation under a common API that provides portability to application developers," said Neil Trevett, president of Khronos and vice president of Mobile Content at NVIDIA. "This initiative will also enable advanced applications such as augmented reality that need to process and synchronize multiple sensors for a truly seamless end-user experience."

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

 

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

Cassidian selects Presagis Seawind OpenGL Software driver and S3 Graphics 2300E GPU for digital maps

Highly efficient chip architecture and off-the-shelf OpenGL software driver enable aerospace leader to bring highly innovative digital map to embedded avionics systems

Munich, Germany – Avionics Europe 2011 - March 16, 2011 – Presagis™, a leading provider of commercial-off-the shelf (COTS) modeling, simulation, and embedded graphics solutions, today announced that Cassidian, the defence and security division of aerospace group EADS, has purchased the Presagis SeaWind OpenGL Software Driver and S3 Graphics 2300E Graphics Processing Unit (2300E GPU) solution for their digital map application.  With this purchase, Cassidian is taking advantage of the specific technical capabilities offered by this combined Presagis and S3 Graphics solution to build an embedded system with a digital map that they will deploy on a variety of aircraft.

"Cassidian carefully evaluated the OpenGL software drivers and chips on the market and we selected the combination of Presagis and S3 for the performance, scalability, and dependability of their offering," said Andreas Schacht, Head of Avionics Driver & Support Software, Cassidian.  "We look for vendors who can provide us with the best technology and services, as well as vendors whom we can rely on for long term support and supply as we deploy our avionics applications in the coming years."

The recently announced SeaWind and SeaWind-178 OpenGL software driver support for the S3 Graphics 2300E GPU provides Presagis customers like Cassidian with access to a new graphics processor and OpenGL software driver that are optimized for a variety of applications; including traditional cockpit displays, next generation menu-based displays and digital maps for cockpits in both certifiable and non-certifiable programs.  SeaWind for the S3 2300E GPU includes support for OpenGL 1.5, GLX, and X11R7.  SeaWind-178 for the S3 2300E GPU includes complete support for certification up through Level A of a full OpenGL SC 1.0.1 environment.

"Digital moving maps, 3D, and video capture, are clearly the forefront of development in embedded avionics," said Robert Kopersiewich, Vice President and Product Segment Lead for Embedded Graphics at Presagis.  "We are very excited by Cassidian’s choice of our SeaWind drivers with the S3 2300E GPU, as it underscores the Presagis belief that in bringing the best GPUs to market, coupled with OpenGL software drivers engineered for safety as well as performance, we are enabling our clients to fully exploit graphics technology in embedded applications."

The 2300E GPU is a performant and highly efficient chip, operating with less power consumption than the industry norm making it well suited to deployment in cockpits.  The Presagis—S3 Graphics development relationship, and associated SeaWind driver support of the 2300E GPU, represent a major milestone for certifiable graphics chips by offering a simpler GPU architecture, a DO-254 data package, and a platform upon which to base development for the long term.

By purchasing this combined solution, customers, like Cassidian, are able to take advantage of the latest GPU technology on the market while avoiding the time-consuming and costly process of developing OpenGL software drivers in-house.  In addition, Presagis also provides customers with associated services for the new GPU. These services include delivering customized hardware design support for customers assembling proprietary systems with the 2300E GPU.

About Presagis SeaWind & SeaWind-178 OpenGL Software

Built following stringent DO-178B guidelines, SeaWind-178 Certifiable Graphics Software can be certified up to Design Assurance Level A, the highest level possible. The SeaWind-178 family of products is based on the OpenGL SC 1.0 API and includes additional optional modules that support specific application requirements, including video, windowing, digital maps, and custom APIs. This modular set of components allows customers to purchase and certify only the software they actually need, thereby minimizing the memory footprint of the software as well as the amount of software that must be certified on the customer device.  As the Chair of the OpenGL Working Group of Khronos, Presagis is committed to the development and growth of the OpenGL standard.

About the S3 Graphics 2300E GPU

The S3 Graphics 2300E graphics processor brings 3D gaming performance and HD video capture to embedded applications requiring advanced multimedia capabilities in heat and power constrained environments. The 2300E GPU measures 23mm x 23mm and is ideal in compact and small form factor embedded systems, requiring a fanless graphics solution with advanced display connectivity. Combining longevity, portability, performance and value, the S3 Graphics 2300E offers an ideal balance of low power and scalability for multimedia-intensive applications.

 

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Presagis is a global leader providing commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) modeling, simulation and embedded graphics solutions to the aerospace and defense markets and is the only developer to deliver a unified COTS software portfolio based on open-standards. Presagis combines cutting-edge technology with innovative services to help customers streamline workflow, reduce project risks, create detailed models and complex simulations, in addition to developing DO-178B certifiable applications. The company services more than 1,000 active customers worldwide, including many of the world's most respected organizations such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Airbus, BAE Systems and CAE. For more information, visit www.presagis.com .

Khronos Releases Final WebGL 1.0 Specification

Royalty-free specification brings OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics functionality to HTML5; Adopted by Apple, Google, Mozilla and Opera with implementations shipping today; Free conformance tests available from Khronos; Call for Participation in WebCL Initiative

3rd March, 2011 – Game Developers Conference, San Francisco – The Khronos™ Group today released the final WebGL™ 1.0 specification to enable hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in HTML5 Web browsers without the need for plug-ins.  WebGL defines a JavaScript binding to OpenGL® ES 2.0 to allow rich 3D graphics within a browser on any platform supporting the industry-standard OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics APIs.  WebGL has the support of major silicon and browser vendors including Apple, Google, Mozilla and Opera with multiple browsers already shipping with WebGL implementations including the beta releases for Mozilla Firefox 4.0, all channels of Google Chrome 9.0, an Opera preview build, and Apple Mac OS Safari nightly builds.

WebGL leverages the pervasive availability of OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics on almost all browser-capable desktop, mobile and embedded platforms and the recent developments in Web technology including the massive increases in JavaScript performance.  The ability for Web developers to directly access OpenGL-class graphics directly from JavaScript, and freely mix 3D with other HTML content, will enable a new wave of innovation in Web gaming, educational and training applications and graphically rich user interfaces to make the Web more enjoyable, productive and intuitive.

There is already a thriving middleware ecosystem around WebGL to provide a wide diversity of Web developers the ability to easily create compelling 3D content for WebGL-enabled browsers.  These tools include: C3DL, CopperLicht , EnergizeGL, GammaJS, GLGE, GTW, O3D, OSG.JS, SceneJS, SpiderGL, TDL, Three.js and X3DOM.  Links to these authoring tools and WebGL demos can be found at www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki/Main_Page.

In addition to the WebGL specification, Khronos has created a comprehensive WebGL test suite that can be downloaded free of charge.  Implementers of WebGL capable browsers can run the test suite and upload their passing test results in order be able to designate their implementations as conformant to the WebGL specification.  More details on WebGL conformance tests can be found at www.khronos.org/implementers/webgl/.

"WebGL enables an entire new class of applications on the web.  Being able to take advantage of first-class 3D hardware acceleration in a browser on both desktop and mobile allows web developers to create compelling and immersive experiences for their users," said Vlad Vukićević of Mozilla and chair of the WebGL Working Group.

"HI CORPORATION is very excited about WebGL and believes that the combination of WebGL and HTML5 will become a very important platform," said Hirotaka Suzuki, CTO. "HI CORPORATION is deeply committed to WebGL and is planning to bring many of our technologies to the arena."

  "NVIDIA helped to form the WebGL initiative as we believe it will fundamentally change the Web experience and we are committed to provide the optimal WebGL experience across Quadro and GeForce graphics on desktops and Tegra-based superphones and tablets," said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president mobile content at NVIDIA.  "The Khronos WebGL Working Group is a uniquely productive forum that has brought together the expertise of both browser and GPU vendors.  Khronos is committed to working with the Web community to ensure WebGL is a dynamic and enabling piece of the Web HTML5 ecosystem for both desktop and mobile platforms."

"WebGL will finally free web developers from the confines of 2D without the need for a plug-in," said Tim Johansson, lead graphics developer, Opera Software. "Once WebGL becomes pervasive, we can look forward to a new era in creativity on the Web. Opera is excited to be part of the WebGL initiative. We intend to support WebGL in our browsers, whether on computers, mobile phones or TVs."

"Qualcomm is pleased to be an early adopter of open standards for mobile 3D graphics applications, including OpenGL ES and WebGL. We look forward to helping our partners lead the connected, mobile experience by integrating WebGL into our power-efficient Snapdragon wireless platforms that include Qualcomm’s embedded Adreno GPUs and Qualcomm’s enhanced, high-performance family of integrated CPUs," said Raj Talluri, vice president of product management for Qualcomm. "Integrating WebGL acceleration into our Snapdragon platforms will allow developers to deliver stunning new 3D applications through the web that perform comparably to native applications that are preinstalled on today’s Smartphones and Tablet devices."

Khronos is also today announcing the formation of the WebCL™ working group to explore defining a JavaScript binding to the Khronos OpenCL™ standard for heterogeneous parallel computing.  WebCL creates the potential to harness GPU and multi-core CPU parallel processing from a Web browser, enabling significant acceleration of applications such as image and video processing and advanced physics for WebGL games.  Any company interested to participate in the definition of WebCL is invited to send a request for more information to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

See Khronos and WebGL at GDC
  Please visit Khronos at booth #1444 at the Game Developer Conference (GDC), March 2-4, 2011 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco to learn more about WebGL.  Khronos is also running a series of developer university sessions on Thursday, March 3rd, in Room 301 in the South Hall:
WebGL at 9AM, OpenGL at 10:30AM, Demos at 12 noon, COLLADA at 1:30PM, OpenCL at 3PM, Beer and demos at 4:30PM and finally Mobile APIs at 4:50PM.  More details about Khronos activities at GDC can be found at: http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/gdc-2011-san-francisco.

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

 

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

Khronos Group Releases Free COLLADA Conformance Test Suite

Enables widespread testing of COLLADA import and export functionality for 3D toolchain interoperability;  COLLADA adopted by Second Life, Poser Pro and other leading applications; COLLADA fueling content for emerging WebGL standard for 3D on the Web

3rd March, 2011 – Game Developers Conference, San Francisco – The Khronos™ Group today announced that it is making the COLLADA™ 1.4 Conformance Test Suite available free of charge to all developers.  COLLADA is an open, XML-based industry standard that enables assets to be freely interchanged between 3D authoring applications which can then be mixed and matched in powerful combinations.  The COLLADA test suite is a comprehensive set of over 500 detailed tests and a scripted framework that rigorously exercises applications that import and export COLLADA assets to ensure that they can reliably participate in a COLLADA-based toolchain.

Any developer that wishes to test COLLADA import and export functionality can now sign up at no charge to be a COLLADA Implementer to gain access to the source of the COLLADA CTS for running on their own platforms.  If an Implementer wishes to state that their tested products have passed the Khronos tests, they must upload successful test results to a provided Khronos server.  Developers creating authoring applications are encouraged to become full COLLADA Adopters for a small fee that provides access to a more formalized test review process and permission to use the COLLADA logo and a series of COLLADA Conformance Badges confirming to users the quality of their COLLADA interoperability.  More information on COLLADA conformance testing is available www.khronos.org/implementers and www.khronos.org/adopters.

"Smith Micro has a strong interest in COLLADA conformance. Our Poser Pro 2010 product will benefit from the ability to publicly promote conformance to the COLLADA specification," said Uli Klumpp, Director of Engineering; Productivity & Graphics at Smith Micro.  "Access to the conformance test suite also provides us with a valuable tool for test automation, allowing us to expand test coverage greatly with little extra effort."

"3D assets need to be portable and so the world needs COLLADA!  But any digital interchange format needs to be reliably and robustly used by applications to fulfill its full potential, and that is why Khronos has released the extensive COLLADA conformance test suite free of charge.  Now the COLLADA community and developers have the tools they need to ensure COLLADA can be imported and exported universally and reliably," said Neil Trevett, president of Khronos and vice president of Mobile Content at NVIDIA. "COLLADA is also a vital piece in the puzzle of bringing 3D pervasively to the Web and more pieces of that puzzle came together today with the release of WebGL 1.0 specification and the adoption of COLLADA by leading 3D Web applications such as Second Life."

In September 2010, Linden Lab opened Beta testing for COLLADA mesh import to Second Life, enabling content created in mainstream 3D creation tools, such as Maya or Blender, to be imported directly into Second Life in much the same way that animations and textures can be uploaded.

"As the largest user-created 3D virtual world, Second Life has its own custom content authoring system.  The COLLADA standard allows us to open up content creation to the wealth of powerful 3D authoring tools outside the virtual world, bringing a new level of richness to the content in Second Life and offering content creators a new venue for their creations," said Charlie Hite, Product Owner for Content Creation, Linden Lab.  "We will be in the Khronos booth at GDC showing how COLLADA allows import from those tools into Second Life by taking mesh objects out of several tools, exporting them as COLLADA files, and uploading them into Second Life, where we further manipulate them and work collaboratively on them with other people in world."

The KataSpace open source framework from Katalabs enables browser-based virtual worlds using emerging Web standards like WebGL and WebSockets without requiring proprietary plugins.  Katalabs’ OurBricks project enables users to upload and share 3D models and perform simple editing on the site.  The content is then cleaned, optimized, normalized and delivered as a ZIP archive that contains the 3D assets as COLLADA documents accessible via a WebGL-accessible URL.

"3D content types have not been natively handled in the browser until WebGL in the same way that video files needed the <video> tag.  WebGL is a historic step in bring 3D natively to browsers without plugins," said Henrik Bennetsen, CEO of Katalabs.  "We think everything that has made the Web great has been open and use-case agnostic.  We see COLLADA as the way forward for a very Web-like 3D format that complements browser WebGL capability perfectly."

See Khronos and COLLADA at GDC
Please visit Khronos at booth #1444 at the Game Developer Conference (GDC), March 2-4, 2011 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco to learn more about COLLADA.  Khronos is also running a series of developer university sessions on Thursday, March 3rd, in Room 301 in the South Hall: WebGL at 9AM, OpenGL at 10:30AM, Demos at 12 noon, COLLADA at 1:30PM, OpenCL at 3PM, Beer and demos at 4:30PM and finally Mobile APIs at 4:50PM.  More details about Khronos activities at GDC can be found at: http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/gdc-2011-san-francisco

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

 

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

Imagination submits POWERVR SGX cores for OpenCL conformance

MWC, Barcelona, Spain, February 14th 2011: Imagination Technologies, a leading multimedia and communications technologies company, announces that it has submitted POWERVR SGX drivers for OpenCL 1.0 Embedded Profile conformance with Khronos.*

Says Tony King-Smith, VP marketing, Imagination: “OpenCL enables developers to take their algorithms beyond the computational limits of CPUs and run them on highly parallel, scalable and compute intensive GPUs. We are delighted to be at the forefront in enabling this trend which will drive demand for embedded GPU technologies to new levels.”

OpenCL capability will be available to POWERVR SGX licensees with the latest release of production drivers.

Imagination is demonstrating OpenCL applications running on currently shipping POWERVR SGX enabled products at MWC 2011 in Barcelona from Feb 14-17th (Hall 1D45).

Notes

*Conformance submission is POWERVR SGX 535, Linux, for OpenCL 1.0 EP

Product is based on a published Khronos Specification, and is expected to pass the Khronos ConformanceTesting Process. Current conformance status can be found at www.khronos.org/conformance.

About Imagination Technologies

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