The Virtual Learning Factory Toolkit (VLFT) project is a pioneering program commissioned by the European Union using virtual and augmented reality to enhance engineering education programs across Europe. Five EU partners make up the VLFT Consortium, including Estonia’s Tallinn University of Technology, Hungary’s Institute for Computer Science and Control, Italy’s Politecnico di Milano, National Research Council of Italy, and Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology. Using Khronos® standards, the VLFT consortium has created a suite of tools to gamify learning, strengthen information and communication technology (ICT) skills, and better prepare students for jobs in 21st century manufacturing.

The upcoming release of the Vulkan® SC™ 1.0 specification by Khronos will mark an important milestone in developing an open API standard that leverages the performance of modern GPUs to satisfy the graphics and compute needs of future safety critical systems. As the Vulkan SC Working Group continues to make significant progress, we take this opportunity to share some of the challenges that have been overcome on our journey to define a state-of-the-art API specifically designed to benefit the automotive and avionics industries.

The Khronos 3D Formats Working Group recently announced the ratification of three new Physically Based Rendering (PBR) extensions for the glTF 3D asset format: KHR_materials_volume, KHR_materials_ior, and KHR_materials_specular. The three new extensions build on and extend the existing glTF 2.0 PBR capabilities by adding volume-based absorption, refraction, and complex specular reflections. Some or all of these new extensions are already supported by rendering engines such as Babylon.js, Google’s Filament, and three.js, as well as applications including Adobe’s Substance 3D Stager, Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE Platform, DGG RapidCompact and UX3D’s Gestaltor. These extensions will grant artists control of photorealistic effects in glTF, enhancing the appearance of 3D assets. This blog will explore how these extensions are implemented and which variables will be available for artists to control.

Khronos has found that DigitalOcean understands us as a customer and offers the tools and services that are matched to our needs and are reliable, well thought-out, and easy-to-use. Khronos is grateful for the support DigitalOcean provides to Khronos and our standardization activities, and we look forward to continuing to ride the DigitalOcean wave.

As the number of 3D assets used in e-commerce rapidly increases, the need to embed semantic information describing virtual products within real-time 3D formats such as glTF™ becomes ever more urgent. 3D asset files that contain descriptive and administrative metadata such as product descriptions, details on intellectual property rights, creation and modification dates and other detailed authoring history - all in multiple languages - will e

In the world of simulation we are accustomed to dealing with both extremely large datasets and very long compute times. Even with modern GPU acceleration and large amounts of memory the resolution of the domain required to accurately simulate even a subset of real-world physics can result in compute times that run into the days or even weeks and datasets that are many tens of gigabytes in size. When you have datasets this large it can be difficult to distill this down into something that you can derive valuable insights from and keeping these enormous datasets in the cloud allows us to use scalable cloud resources to process the data. This is something that has become more of a pressing issue as the simulation capabilities of Autodesk Fusion 360 have expanded.

In early 2018 the Vulkan Working Group at Khronos started to explore how to seamlessly integrate hardware accelerated video compression and decompression into the Vulkan API. Today, Khronos is releasing a set of Provisional Vulkan Video acceleration extensions : ‘Vulkan Video’. This blog will give you an overview of Vulkan’s new video processing capabilities and we welcome feedback before the extensions are finalized so that the

Synchronization is a critical but often misunderstood part of the Vulkan API. The new VK_KHR_synchronization2 extension includes several improvements to make Vulkan Synchronization easier to use, without major changes to the fundamental concepts described below. We’ll highlight key differences introduced with Synchronization2 throughout the blog.

The newly released VK_KHR_synchronization2 extension brings extensive improvements to Vulkan queue submission, events, and pipeline barriers resulting in API significant usability enhancements for developers. Synchronization2 highlights include: Data for semaphores and command buffers is passed in arrays of structures, rather than in separate arrays spread across multiple structures, to streamline queue submissions. Barrier pipeline stage masks

Today, Khronos released a major update to SYCL with the final SYCL 2020 specification, marking years of specification development, industry feedback, and evolution of the standard to bring valuable new features and greater alignment with ISO C++. As part of the announcement, we are also sharing the increased adoption and expansion of SYCL implementations that have been released in the past year. SYCL 2020 adds significantly more features and fixe

Today, the functionality of the Vulkan SDK gets a major upgrade for Vulkan developers targeting Apple platforms. LunarG is now shipping Device Simulation (DevSim) and Validation layers for the Vulkan SDK on macOS in addition to Linux and Windows. DevSim layers enable Vulkan application development on a highly-capable development system by "simulating" a less-capable target Vulkan implementation through constraining the reported features and resources on the more-capable platform. Validation layers verify that applications are correctly using the reported Vulkan functionality. The validation layers and associated Vulkan loader on macOS also now support Apple Silicon via Universal Binaries.

On November 18, 2020, WebGL held an engaging and informative virtual WebGL Meetup. Co-organizer of the event, Damon Hernandez, led the discussion and kicked off the meeting by having the Chair of WebGL, Ken Russell, giving an update on the latest WebGL progress along with some “Cool WebGL Stuff.” After the update, the guest speakers addressed several topics.

For the past two years, Holochip has been working on light field technology for the US Navy’s Aegis program. The program calls for a table top light field display that can accommodate horizontal and vertical real-time parallax. In October 2020, the team working on OpenXR™ at Holochip released an open source Vulkan® example project and started work with light field display technology using the OpenXR API. As a result of both efforts, Holochip has discovered a method of light field real-time rendering that is built upon the Khronos Group’s Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions.

The Khronos Vulkan Ray Tracing Task Sub Group (TSG) has developed and released a set of extensions that seamlessly integrate ray tracing functionality into the existing Vulkan framework. This blog summarizes how the Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions were developed, and illustrates how they can be used by developers to bring ray tracing functionality to their applications.

Recently, the Khronos 3D Commerce Working Group hosted a webinar to discuss its activities, including why industry alignment on the glTF file format (the “JPEG for 3D”) is crucial, and how standardization will bring new opportunities to any designer, retailer, manufacturer or technology company developing 3D experiences. At the end of the webinar, the audience submitted questions for panelists. As this dialogue benefits the whole community, we’re sharing the answers as a Q&A. You can watch the complete webinar recording, but this is not a verbatim transcription: The questions have been reordered for a logical flow, and additional data released since the webinar has been added. If you have questions of your own, comment below and we’ll be sure to get back to you!