Khronos is responsible for bringing more than Vulkan, OpenGL, and WebGL to the world. The Khronos Group and its members have created over 25 standards to date, a list that continually grows as needs for new standards arise from growing industries.

Recently I asked the community for beginner-friendly resources on Vulkan, and I compiled a list of them that you can find below. For the beginners reading this, Vulkan is a new graphics API-- in other words, a way to communicate with your GPU and make it do things. It's managed by the Khronos Group, which means it's under multi-company governance - being managed by the industry for the industry. Anyone who wants to do work on GPUs (not restricted to graphics programmers!) should at least have a high level knowledge of what it is.

In early August the team was at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles, where we celebrated OpenGL’s 25th anniversary at the BOF Blitz Party. We also announced a new website, as well as OpenGL 4.6, a growing glTF ecosystem, and the Vulkan Portability Initiative.

Following the successful release of glTF 2.0, Khronos’ 3D asset transmission format continues to gain strong industry momentum, including support from Microsoft and Google. Today, Khronos has revealed that Google has released a new draft extension to use Draco geometry compression to make glTF files significantly more compact, that the Blender Exporter for glTF 2.0 is now complete and in beta, as well as Microsoft continuing to use glTF 2.0 to bring 3D capabilities to Paint 3D and Microsoft office. So – what is glTF? And why is it gaining so much adoption throughout the industry?

To expand the number of platforms that Vulkan can support, Khronos has formed a Vulkan Portability Technical Subgroup within its Vulkan Working Group. This subgroup is tasked with developing specifications, open-source library code and tools, together with conformance tests to define and support the set of Vulkan capabilities that can be made universally available across all major platforms, including those not currently served by Vulkan.

Adobe announced on July 25, 2017 that it will “end-of-life” Flash Player in 2020 and named WebGL— a widely-deployed, royalty-free web API standard for 2D and 3D graphics—as a successor to enable the next phase of rich interactive applications in your browser.

If you are going to be at the 44th SIGGRAPH, the largest conference and exhibition in computer graphics and exhibition techniques, from July 30 – August 3, 2017 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, don’t miss the opportunity to eat, drink, and learn about all things Khronos!

On May 16, OpenCL 2.2 was released by Khronos Group. The most important part of the new OpenCL version is support for OpenCL C++ kernel language, which is defined as a static subset of the C++14 standard. OpenCL C++ introduces long-awaited features such as classes, templates, lambda expressions, function and operator overloads, and several other constructs which increase parallel programming productivity through generic programming.

Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, will join other virtual reality industry leaders when he presents at the VR Connects San Francisco global conference happening June 27-28.

In March, we hosted a webinar that gave viewers a deep-dive presentation on the Vulkan Loader, presented by Mark Young and Lenny Komow from LunarG. They discussed different aspects of the loader, including its overall design, and features including dispatchable objects, instance versus device objects and commands, trampolines and terminators, extension handling, and much more. To get all the details, view the webinar here, or check out our five k

Khronos hosted a WebGL 2.0 webinar on April 11, 2017. We covered the new features in WebGL 2.0, and even saw a few demos. WebGL 1.0 was released in 2011, introducing plugin-free 3D rendering to the Web for the first time. Since then it’s been widely used for all kinds of web-based 3D applications both on the desktop and iOS and Android phones — especially for web gaming. WebGL is integrated into all the major browsers, including Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Edge, Safari, and Firefox. “WebGL just works for everyone.” WebGL is available on 92 percent of browsers globally, and 96 percent of browsers in the U.S. - enabling truly write once, run everywhere 3D applications.

The LunarG Vulkan software development kit (SDK) provides the development and runtime components required to build, run, and debug Vulkan applications. Developers can download the LunarG Vulkan SDK from the LunarXchange website.  This blog post will discuss security as it relates to the Vulkan Runtime and Loader on Windows OS.

Five years ago The International Workshop on OpenCL (IWOCL – "eye-wok-ul") started as a small OpenCL-focused conference. In 2017 it has grown to three full days filled with tutorials, talks, posters and many technical discussions. You’ll hear attendees (and yourself) saying, "I did not know this was going on and I should have known it before." It is a great place to learn the latest on OpenCL. IWOCL is May 16-18, 2017 in Toronto, Canada. This year’s conference program is on the IWOCL web page and includes four tutorials, 19 technical sessions, and a Khronos panel discussion. Below is a compact overview of the technical sessions, posters, and tutorials to give you the highlights in under three minutes.

Don’t miss this year’s OpenVX Workshop at Embedded Vision Summit. Khronos will present a day-long hands-on workshop all about OpenVX cross-platform neural network acceleration API for embedded vision applications. We’ve developed a new curriculum so even if you attended in past years, this is a do-not-miss, jam-packed tutorial with new information on computer vision algorithms for feature tracking and neural networks mapped to the graph API. We’ll be doing a hands-on practice session that gives participants a chance to solve real computer vision problems using OpenVX with the folks who created the API. We’ll also be talking about the OpenVX roadmap and what’s to come.

New things are always in the pipeline for Khronos, and we want to share the news. We’re rejuvenating the Khronos Blog, with regular blog posts about what we’re doing, what’s happening in our community, and insight from our members. We will have more regular postings from our members and working group chairs, and we’re also opening a call for guest posts from anyone who would like to contribute to the conversation! We want to hear from you; what you see as important in the industry, developments, trends, tips, and new practices from your perspective.