Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) announced that COLLADA (COLLAborative Design Activity), a common data format for content developers, will become an open standard under the Khronos Group. COLLADA is an XML based file format for interchange of digital assets within the interactive 3D graphics industry to address a critical need for content creators to work freely with their data across many tools and platforms. It is supported by the biggies of content creation including Alias, Discreet and SoftImage. SCE is committed to continuing to support and develop COLLADA within the Khronos Group, and aims to further enhance the development environment and tools that the company provides to the creative community for developing new computer entertainment content. For details about developments with Collada, check out the Siggraph Tech Talk Wed Aug 3, 1-3PM. For more news about how Collada fits in with the Khronos embedded APIs for authoring and acceleration, check back Monday, Aug 1, 2005 for some key announcements.
The new PowerVR SGX cores for wireless applications are part of Imagination’s PowerVR Series5 scalable and fully programmable unified shader graphics and video core family. The first cores from this family target mainstream and performance mobile graphics with state-of-the-art support for 2D and 3D and an industry leading feature set that exceeds OpenGL ES 2.0 shader requirements. The SGX’s shader system merges vertex and pixel shading into a single pipeline. PowerVR SGX is backwardly compatible with key features from the PowerVR MBX family, with continued support for all existing PowerVR extensions to OpenGL ES 1.1.
Quantum3D’s IData ES extends the benefits of COTS realtime 3D visual computing solutions to handheld systems, such as PDAs, cell phones, portable gaming devices, and GPS systems. Databases developed within IData’s HMI tool environment transition seamlessly from PC and RTOS-based OpenGL environments to multi-vendor embedded OpenGL ES implementations under multiple operating systems, with no changes to the user application or underlying data set. IData ES features support for OpenGL ES 1.0, 1.2 and the OpenGL ES Safety Critical 1.0 profile. In each case, the IData Render Engine extracts the maximum features and performance from the target platform, delivering the same compelling HMI displays as it does on the desktop and in advanced workstations.
OpenML is a royalty-free, cross-platform programming environment for capturing, transporting, processing, displaying, and synchronizing digital media - including 2D/3D graphics and audio/video streams. It standardizes support for audio, video, 2D graphics, and 3D graphics at the thinnest possible layer on top of the hardware. The OpenML Reference Implementation and ML SDK is now open source and available on SourceForge.net. Binaries available for Win32 and Linux.
At Sony Computer Entertainment’s PlayStation meeting the company president showed off the development kit hardware and confirmed and the choice of open standards in order to facilitate rapid developer adoption and content creation. The Sony Playstation 3 will be using OpenGL ES for the 3D graphics API, NVIDIA’s Cg shader language and tools (CG compiler, FX composer, ShaderPerf and PerHUD), and the development tools will also incorporate support for the COLLADA format for art asset interchange so that developers can share interactive 3D art among multiple platforms. This also opens the possibility that after the PS3’s launch, the platform could be opened to general development to anyone, not just game developers. (In marked contrast to Xbox).
Falanx Microsystems has added the Mali Video Series Configuration to their line of smart pixel processing cores. It addresses the needs of mobile phone and handheld device manufacturers who want immediate access to high frame rate video capture and playback but also want the option to include rich OpenGL ES-based 3D gaming capabilities in future models. The Mali pixel processors and geometry processing core accelerate video encoding and decoding up to 30 frames per second and handle motion estimation, motion compensation, video scaling, image differencing and color-space conversion tasks. As with all Falanx graphics accelerator cores, the Mali cores include a complete out of the box software stack that is pre-verified to support OpenGL ES. In related news, Falanx submitted the Mali 110 to the OpenGL ES 1.1 conformance process.
At the 2005 Mobilepphone Conference & Exhibit, SKTelekom detailed their plans for GIGA class 4. GIGA (Graphic Instruction Graphic Acceleration) is SK Telecom’s game platform standard to provide linkage between OpenGL ES H/W acceleration and the WIPI platform for mobile handsets. In addition it also enables premium sound systems like MP3, and AAC+, vibration solutions, and gravity sensing. The core GIGA API eases the development process of games, while OpenGL ES 1.0 Common-Lite, 2D API, Math, Util functions provides high performance. Cellular phones designed for GIGA platform are to be powered by ATI’s IMAGEON 2300 series multimedia processor. Because of the dedicated OpenGL ES hardware 3D acceleration in the IMAGEON processor, users of GIGA service will experience on cellular handsets the similar visual quality and 3D gaming performance they have had on PCs and game console. High Level 3D engines that support GIGA and OpenGL ES include Fathammer, HI, Reakosys, Gomid, and Superscape. The PowerPoint of the presentation is available for download.