The Khronos Group - a non-profit industry consortium to develop, publish and promote open standard, royalty-free media authoring and acceleration standards for desktop and handheld devices, combined with conformance qualification programs for platform and device interoperability.
The Khronos Group - Connecting Software to Silicon
The Khronos Group is a not for profit industry consortium creating open standards for the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics, dynamic media, computer vision and sensor processing on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge 3D platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.
OpenGL - The Industry Standard for High Performance Graphics
OpenGL® is the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API in the industry, bringing thousands of applications to a wide variety of computer platforms. It is window-system and operating-system independent as well as network-transparent. OpenGL enables developers of software for PC, workstation, and supercomputing hardware to create high-performance, visually compelling graphics software applications, in markets such as CAD, content creation, energy, entertainment, game development, manufacturing, medical, and virtual reality. OpenGL exposes all the features of the latest graphics hardware.
OpenCL - The open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems
OpenCL™ is the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices. OpenCL (Open Computing Language) greatly improves speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications in numerous market categories from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software.
OpenGL ES is a royalty-free, cross-platform API for full-function 2D and 3D graphics on embedded systems - including consoles, phones, appliances and vehicles. It consists of well-defined subsets of desktop OpenGL, creating a flexible and powerful low-level interface between software and graphics acceleration. OpenGL ES includes profiles for floating-point and fixed-point systems and the EGL specification for portably binding to native windowing systems. OpenGL ES 1.X: fixed function hardware offering acceleration, image quality and performance. OpenGL ES 2.X: enables full programmable 3D graphics.
EGL™ is an interface between Khronos rendering APIs such as OpenGL ES or OpenVG and the underlying native platform window system. It handles graphics context management, surface/buffer binding, and rendering synchronization and enables high-performance, accelerated, mixed-mode 2D and 3D rendering using other Khronos APIs.
WebGL is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that brings OpenGL ES 2.0 to the web as a 3D drawing context within HTML, exposed as low-level Document Object Model interfaces. It uses the OpenGL shading language, GLSL ES, and can be cleanly combined with other web content that is layered on top or underneath the 3D content. It is ideally suited for dynamic 3D web applications in the JavaScript programming language, and will be fully integrated in leading web browsers.
WebCL - Heterogeneous parallel computing in HTML5 web browsers
The WebCL working group is working to define a JavaScript binding to the Khronos OpenCL standard for heterogeneous parallel computing. WebCL will enable web applications to harness GPU and multi-core CPU parallel processing from within a Web browser, enabling significant acceleration of applications such as image and video processing and advanced physics for WebGL games. WebCL is being developed in close cooperation with the Web community and has the potential to extend the capabilities of HTML5 browsers to accelerate computationally intensive and rich visual computing applications.
COLLADA™ defines an XML-based schema to make it easy to transport 3D assets between applications - enabling diverse 3D authoring and content processing tools be combined into a production pipeline. The intermediate language provides comprehensive encoding of visual scenes including: geometry, shaders and effects, physics, animation, kinematics, and even multiple version representations of the same asset.COLLADA FX enables leading 3D authoring tools to work effectively together to create shader and effects applications and assets to be authored and packaged using OpenGL® Shading Language, Cg, CgFX, and DirectX® FX
glTF - runtime asset format for WebGL, OpenGL ES, and OpenGL
The "glTF" project aims to define a final stage OpenGL Transmission Format to enable rapid delivery and loading of 3D content by WebGL, OpenGL, and OpenGL ES APIs. glTF together with COLLADA comprise a standards-based content pipeline for rich 3D web and mobile applications. glTF Specification is a work-in-progress from the COLLADA Working Group; it is not an official Khronos-ratified specification yet. It is incomplete and subject to change. The draft specification and related converters and loaders are available on github.
OpenVG - The Standard for Vector Graphics Acceleration
OpenVG™ is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that provides a low-level hardware acceleration interface for vector graphics libraries such as Flash and SVG. OpenVG is targeted primarily at handheld devices that require portable acceleration of high-quality vector graphics for compelling user interfaces and text on small screen devices - while enabling hardware acceleration to provide fluidly interactive performance at very low power levels.
OpenSL ES - The Standard for Embedded Audio Acceleration
OpenSL ES™ is a royalty-free, cross-platform, hardware-accelerated audio API tuned for embedded systems. It provides a standardized, high-performance, low-latency method to access audio functionality for developers of native applications on embedded mobile multimedia devices, enabling straightforward cross-platform deployment of hardware and software audio capabilities, reducing implementation effort, and promoting the market for advanced audio.
OpenMAX IL - The Standard for Media Library Portability
OpenMAX™ is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that provides comprehensive streaming media codec and application portability by enabling accelerated multimedia components to be developed, integrated and programmed across multiple operating systems and silicon platforms. The OpenMAX API will be shipped with processors to enable library and codec implementers to rapidly and effectively make use of the full acceleration potential of new silicon - regardless of the underlying hardware architecture.
OpenMAX AL - The Standard for Media Library Portability
OpenMAX™ is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that provides comprehensive streaming media codec and application portability by enabling accelerated multimedia components to be developed, integrated and programmed across multiple operating systems and silicon platforms. The OpenMAX API will be shipped with processors to enable library and codec implementers to rapidly and effectively make use of the full acceleration potential of new silicon - regardless of the underlying hardware architecture.
StreamInput - Cross-platform advanced sensor processing and user interaction
The Khronos StreamInput working group is driving industry consensus to create a cross-platform API to enable applications to discover and use new generation sensors to create sophisticated user interactions. The new API will support a general-purpose framework for consistently handling advanced sensors such as depth cameras, touch screens and motion and orientation sensors as well as traditional input devices. StreamInput will provide flexible device discovery to enable an application to select and process high-level semantic input from low-level device capabilities, enabling significant innovations by sensor and device manufacturers while simplifying portable application development. The API will also provide system-wide sensor synchronization for advanced multi-sensor applications such as augmented reality, and will use Khronos’ proven extension mechanisms to enable new types of input devices to be easily added and supported.
OpenVX - Hardware acceleration for Computer Vision applications & libraries
Computer vision has become an essential component of many modern applications including gesture tracking, smart video surveillance, automatic driver assistance, biometrics, computational photography, augmented reality, visual inspection, robotics and more. The OpenVX working group has been formed to drive industry consensus to create a cross-platform API standard to enable hardware vendors to implement and optimize accelerated computer vision algorithms. The OpenVX API can accelerate high-level libraries, such as OpenCV open source vision library, or be used by applications directly. A strong focus will be on providing computer vision on mobile and embedded systems and enabling acceleration on a wide variety of computing architectures including CPUs, GPUs and DSPs. OpenVX will explore interoperability with existing Khronos standards for camera control, video processing, compute acceleration and graphics rendering.
Chapters - Community driven regional meetup groups
Chapters host all kinds of Khronos technology-related events, from casual meet ups and socials to hack fests, fundraisers, guest lectures, community service and educational events.
Tech Soup announces its first OpenGL 3 training course, July 20-23, 2009, in Washington DC. The course covers new features in OpenGL 3, porting strategies, the OpenGL Shading Language, and 3D graphics concepts. Students learn the mechanisms behind fast, efficient, current 3D graphics with OpenGL 3 in a hands-on environment featuring several coding labs. Visit the Tech Soup web site to register online.
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The Khronos Group hosted a series of OpenCL tutorials at the Hotchips 2009 event in August on high performance chips. All of these OpenCL tutorials are now online in the Khronos Developers Library. Included are tutorials from AMD, EA, Intel, Nokia, NVIDIA, and of course the Khronos Group.
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Symbio's Petri Talala will present interesting use cases leveraging Khronos API environments at the GDC Khronos Mobile Session 3-4PM on Friday, March 12.
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Tech Soup announces open registration for its next OpenSceneGraph (OSG) course, October 5-7, 2010, in South Lake Union, Seattle, Washington. This class will teach students everything to be proficient in OSG in a 3-day intensive course. This course covers everything developers need to know to take maximum advantage of OpenSceneGraph from intermediate through advanced. We'll also take a tour through VirtualPlanetBuilder so you can build geospecific, tiled, paged datasets.
Developers attending the course learn the mechanisms behind effective OSG development from scenegraph creation and manipulation through debugging & optimizing. Through instruction and labs, students build scenes and interact with real code from day one. The course is fast-paced, requires creativity and problem solving, and leaves users with a thorough immersion in OpenSceneGraph. Instruction is hands-on with numerous labs where students directly turn concepts into practical knowledge.
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See numerous Khronos members demonstrate on the “Khronos Pavilion” and teach about Khronos APIs at “Developer University.” Following our successful participation in SIGGRAPH Asia 2009, the Khronos Group is dramatically increasing our participation at SIGGRAPH Asia 2010 in Seoul. We are hosting Khronos Developer University co-located with SIGGRAPH Asia, and numerous Khronos members have joined together and each is taking a demonstration suite to create a large number of exciting demos in the Khronos Pavilion on the SIGGRAPH trade show floor. We are looking forward to seeing you all there.
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NVIDIA has posted the complete slide set on 'WebGL: Bringing 3D to the Web' presented by Vladimir Vukicevic from Mozilla online. The slides include the live voice-over by Vladimir from the actual presentation.
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This international meeting of experts provides a single forum for representatives of all standards bodies and the contributors to AR standards development processes to meet and discuss their activities and progress, and to advance new specifications more rapidly than is possible without face-to-face interactions. This meeting will be based on a mixture of submitted papers, invited talks and open format, group discussions. In order to inform discussions and to select speakers, participants are encouraged, but not required, to submit papers.
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Visit the Khronos Group at GDC 2011 in March. We have lots of demos, exciting news, a DevU happening on March 3rd, and free Khronos API laminated reference cards to hand out. Do you want to find out more about WebGL, COLLADA, OpenGL, OpenGL ES or OpenCL? Drop by our booth #1444 in the Moscone Center. Our DevU will be held at the Esplanade level, Room 301. See you there!
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NVIDIA is excited to announce another unrivaled week of innovation, learning and networking. GTC 2011 will take place October 11-14, 2011 at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. Whether you're a returning alumni or planning to come for the very first time, you'll find the best and the brightest from all over the world demonstrating cutting-edge work across a wide variety of fields. Call for Submissions will open in March 2011.
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