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.
Camera Work Group - CALL for Industry Participation
The Khronos Camera working group is creating an open, royalty-free standard for advanced, low-level control of mobile and embedded cameras and sensors: Mobile and embedded devices are increasingly being equipped with the sensors and processing power for advanced camera-based applications such as computational photography, face and gesture processing, augmented reality and 3D object and scene reconstruction; While Khronos is defining APIs for vision and image processing the industry still lacks a camera API with low-level control of the camera sensor, lens and flash to generate the input image stream needed by cutting-edge computational photography and computer vision; The Camera working group will drive industry consensus to create a cross-platform API that provides functionality such as: burst control over sensor, flash and lens, system wide time stamping of sensor samples, multiple sensor control, output format and resolution selection, region of interest extraction, and consistent device and frame metadata.
On February 13, 2013, Qualcomm mobile processors were one of the first to receive certification by the Khronos Group for conformance with the OpenGL ES 3.0 specifications. This is the latest version of the most widely used high-level, cross-platform graphics API for games and sophisticated graphics programming. Upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon™ 600 and 800 processors with the latest industry leading Adreno™ 300 series GPUs will support OpenGL ES 3.0.
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Imagination’s PowerVR Series6 GPU technologies have now achieved full conformance with the latest version of OpenGL ES, marking another major milestone for this family of efficient, low power GPU IP cores which have been among the first OpenGL ES 3.0-conformant graphics cores to ship in consumer products. OpenGL ES 3.0 is the first update to OpenGL ES since 2004, bringing new features to the mobile standard that were previously only available on the desktop-oriented OpenGL 3.3 and 4.2. Khronos has kept backwards compatibility with OpenGL ES 2.0 but introduced new capabilities within the rendering pipeline, extended the list of texture formats, updated the GLSL ES shading language, and enhanced texturing functionality and efficiency, among other enhancements.
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OpenGL ES 2 for Android: A Quick-Start Guide will help you find out all about shaders and the OpenGL pipeline, and discover the power of OpenGL ES 2.0, which is much more feature-rich than its predecessor. If you can program in Java and you have a creative vision that you’d like to share with the world, then this is the book for you.
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Version 2 adds support for ETC2 and EAC textures and conversion of legacy LUMINANCE* and INTENSITY* formats when loading in an OpenGL core context. It includes KTX loader tests for OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenGL 3.3. In addition a couple of nasty bugs have been fixed including one in the KTX writer where image rows were not padded to 4 bytes as required by the spec. Complete details of the changes are located in the OpenGL ES SDK. A new version of toktx has also been released. New features are ability to create KTX files with textures in sized internal formats and defaulting to RED and RG formats for 1 and 2 channel textures. Naturally it incorporates the bug-fixed writer from libktx. Visit the KTX home page to download these tools.
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Join us for the first Khronos Boston Chapter Meetup at the British Beer Company in Framingham, MA on Tuesday, June 11th at 6:00PM. The event will feature a talk introducing the newly released OpenGL ES 3.0. After the talk, there will be time for demos and networking. Come learn about OpenGL ES 3.0 and meet others in the Boston area that are interested in 3D graphics with OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and WebGL.
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