Khronos royalty-free open standards for 3D graphics, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Parallel Computing, Machine Learning, and Vision Processing

The agenda for IWOCL & SYCLcon 2023 has been announced! This premier event dedicated to developers using the OpenCL and SYCL APIs will take place in beautiful Cambridge, UK on April 18-20, 2023. It is a unique technical event bringing the developer community together to exchange ideas, solve problems and help steer the future development of the OpenCL and SYCL ecosystems. Early bird pricing is available until the end of March.

Godot 4.0 runs on Windows, Linux, and MacOS, and also Android devices. The Goldot team embedded OpenXR in the engine’s core and introduced Godot XR tools, which will help developers of XR projects. With two new Vulkan backends (Clustered and Mobile), Godot rendering has never been so advanced. While Godot is excited to leverage Vulkan for performance optimization going forward, it was very important not to penalize users with less powerful hardware. For that, they’ve integrated an OpenGL-based compatibility renderer aimed at supporting older and lower-end devices. As always, Godot wants to see people create games on the full spectrum of devices for everyone to enjoy. They’re also working on a Direct3D 12 renderer for better Windows and Xbox support. With Je06jm‘s contribution, you can now also take advantage of AMD’s Fidelity FX Super Resolution 1.0 (FSR 1.0) to dynamically and beautifully render at lower resolution while keeping your game running smoothly. Spoiler: Support for FSR 2.1 is planned in future releases.

At The Polys - WebXR Awards, Patrick Cozzi received the Lifetime Achievement Award for his work on glTF and its use to enable an open and interoperable 3D ecosystem.

glTF is a 3D asset format developed by the Khronos Group that is widely adopted, including for use in 3D Commerce web and native applications. The 3D Commerce Working Group at Khronos brings together industry-leading e-commerce companies to remove the barriers to deploying 3D in e-commerce at industrial scale. Today, the Working Group has released the open source glTF Asset Auditor Tool for content creators throughout the 3D Commerce supply chain to use as part of their asset validation pipelines. By enabling rigorous asset QA to be consistently applied across companies, the amount of 3D model reworking can be greatly reduced while increasing compatibility and ease of use for downstream clients.

Although the glTF Asset Auditor has been initially created to address the needs of 3D Commerce, it works with any glTF file and can benefit any industry that needs to reliably deploy and use 3D assets at a pervasive scale. Read the blog to learn more.

In this educational paper from TU Wien, they conclude that supporting a Vulkan route was much less bumpy for their students than they initially anticipated, and therefore propose a pragmatic route for transitioning to Vulkan in academia for the purpose of teaching real-time computer graphics. Teaching Vulkan from the start will have a positive effect on students for becoming proficient users of modern graphics APIs and, thereby, in more advanced courses when they encounter Vulkan again. Using a low-level API enables students to learn about the massively parallel operation mode of modern GPUs early in their visual computing education. TU Wien’s evaluation has shown that students appreciate the skills and knowledge they picked up through using the Vulkan API. Teaching Vulkan is both viable and beneficial to students who aim to become competent practitioners of visual computing. While the transition may be challenging, it appears to be a worthwhile investment to provide students with future-proof education.

The XR Hands package, which is currently in preview, enables hand tracking by utilising both the default XR subsystem that Unity provides as well as OpenXR. This indicates that it can be used in conjunction with other standard systems such as the XR Interaction Toolkit. Quest and HoloLens are currently supported by XR Hands, and Unity has plans to add support for additional OpenXR headsets that include hand tracking.