IData 178 is a complete DO-178B Certification Package for the production of Level-A safety-critical applications using the Quantum3D IData advanced Human Machine Interface (HMI) toolset. The included IData 178’s DO-178B Render Engine offers avionics developers the full capabilities of IData’s extensible HMI modeling and rendering system to enable developers to produce fully-certifiable cursor-controlled applications that rival the sophistication of desktop applications. IData 178 is fully compliant with the OpenGL ES Safety Critical profile defined by the Khronos Group and with OpenGL subsets offered by industry leading DO-178B OpenGL driver providers including Seaweed Systems and ALT Software as deployed in COTS certifiable RTOS environments such as LynxOS 178, Wind River VxWorks and Green Hills Integrity, as well as proprietary RTOS environments.

Quantum3D and Seaweed Systems will collaborate in the safety-critical embedded graphics market to integegrate the Quantum3D IData 178 DO-178B Level A Certification Package for the Quantum3D IDat Human Machine Interface (HMI) toolset, with Seaweed’s DO-178B certifiable SeaWind/178 OpenGL driver. Both companies believe that OpenGL SC will have a profound impact on their core markets and, as a result, have already independently produced compliant implementations of their own products, SeaWind/178 and IData ES and IData 178 respectively. This new joint marketing agreement establishes the framework for the two companies to extend their cooperative efforts in order to ensure continued close integration between respective future products aimed at the safety critical embedded graphics market.

3DMarkMobile06 Developers Edition is a robust OpenGL ES 1.0 and 1.1 benchmark that tests 3D graphics performance of mobile 3D hardware. High detail game content generates workloads that tax OpenGL ES 3D hardware in a realistic way. Combined with feature tests consisting of pixel processing, vertex processing, and CPU processing, development hardware and prototype device performance can be tested, evaluated and compared, fairly and consistently. Before 3DMark Mobile06, nobody was able to make meaningful apples to apples comparisons of the graphics hardware that we all will have in our future phones. Futuremark will be giving a presentation at the Korean Game Developers conference in Seoul Nov 11, 2005.

NVIDIA has licensed Hybrid’s M3G (JSR 184 API implementation to be used on top of GoForce mediaprocessors to deliver a native, integrated, OpenGL ES hardware accelerated mobile Java 3D API. Through this partnership, NVIDIA will expand its software development toolkit for mobile phones including support for OpenVG 1.0, an SVG (scalable vector graphics) Tiny player and Java bindings for both OpenGL ES (JSR 239) and SVG (JSR 226). NVIDIA can now immediately provide developers with a seamlessly optimized and supported 3D graphics platform for wireless handsets.

The presentations from the Austin Khronos Mobile Gaming Forum are now online. Presentations cover OpenGL ES 1.1 hardware acceleration porting and optimizations, the structure of OpenVG and a brief introduction to the new embedded audio API, OpenSL ES. The Khronos Overview (4.4 MB pdf) is a fast way to understand the Khronos platform for embedded media, from APIs to authoring tools.

This article by Quantum3D discusses how 2D and 3D digital maps, combined with intuitive Human-Machine Interface graphics, will enable shared situational awareness and net-centric collaboration on all levels of embedded systems. OpenGL ES, along with hardware and tools that support it, will help make next-generation advanced HMIs a reality.

The Khronos Mobile Technology Forum at the China Mobile Terminal Industry Development Forum 2005 will feature demos from Fathammer of LGE, Samsung, SKTeletech, Pantech and Curitel phones with OpenGL ES hardware acceleration, as well as presentations from Creative, Emersys, and Nvidia.

This tutorial introduces the Mobile 3D Graphics (M3G) API for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME), defined in JSR 184. M3G defines low- and high-level programming interfaces that bring efficient, interactive 3D graphics to devices with little memory and processing power, and with no required hardware support for 3D graphics or floating-point operations, but can scale up to higher-end devices that have color displays, 3D graphics hardware, and support for floating-point operations. It offers both retained-mode access (scene graphs) and an immediate mode that is aligned with OpenGL ES. The Hybrid Mobile Framework v6 is an implementaiton of M3G that takes advantage of OpenGL ES hardware acceleration.

This article on GameDev.net (first in a series) discusses implications when migrating mobile device developers from SW rendering to HW rendering using OpenGL ES. Key considerations include: use MIP mapping and bilinear filtering for textures; submit fewer, larger groups of polygon; and most importantly, always maintain graphics processor/CPU parallelism and avoid forcing synchronization (with HW accelerated 3D rendering, you have two processors to execute your software; the HW renderer takes all the load of rendering away from the CPU, freeing up for more complex physics, AI or other effects, or simply to allow the program to run at a higher frame-rate).