xNormal is a .NET v2.0 application that creates normal/ambient occlusion maps (DOT3 bump mapping textures) from a very high polygon model and fits it into a low polygon model. It supports import of COLLADA 1.4 data.

Monotype Imaging, one of the most prominent font technology companies has joined the Khronos Group in order to bring their expertise in fonts and text handling to the OpenVG API. OpenVG defines a low-level hardware acceleration layer for vector graphics libraries with support for scalable 2D vector graphics applications and text engines. As a cross-platform API, the OpenVG standard is targeted primarily at handheld devices requiring portable acceleration of high-quality vector graphics for user interfaces and text on small screens. Monotype will held to ensure that OpenVG offers an optimal acceleration layer for the highest quality of scalable, highly legible text.

STMicroelectronics has posted the open source “Bellagio” sample OpenMAX Integration Layer v.1.0 implementation for Linux on sourceforge. The OpenMAX IL API defines a standardized media component interface to enable developers and platform providers to integrate and communicate with multimedia codecs implemented in hardware or software. The Bellagio project includes the libomxil shared library together with the OMX reference component, OMX alsa sink component, and OMX mp3 decoder component (requires ffmpeg and ffmpeg-devel libraries, not part of this package). Sample code is available. Developers are encouraged to contribute to the implementation.

CG2, a wholly owned subsidiary of Quantum3D will develop software and hardware components to support the insertion of high performance collaborative 2D/3D user interfaces with live video feeds into multi-echelon Command and Control applications for the US Army. The graphical rendering engine is based on the Quantum3D cross-platform IData COTS Human Machine Interface suite, including IData3D integrated realtime 3D scene manager, and IDataMP Digital Map components, running under OpenGL ES. The research will help to develop and commercialize user interface technology and APIs that leverages advances in mobile gaming to deliver a collaborative, interactive shared view of the net-centric battle space to the operational commander at multiple echelons, from the platoon and company level upward.

Futuremark has begun developing VGMark07 for benchmarking hardware-accelerated OpenVG performance. This new benchmark will provide handheld industry companies developing OpenVG API enabled hardware with objective and accurate cross platform comparisons of OpenVG performance. (OpenVG provides a standardized low-level hardware acceleration interface for vector graphics libraries such as Flash and SVG and has been recently implemented on Imagination Technologies PowerVR MBX and Falanx Mali110.)

At 3GSM, Falanx demontrated the Mali110 2D/3D graphics accelerator running hardware-accelerated OpenVG for interactive interface content on mobile devices. The OpenVGs API functions including image interpolation, paint generation, advanced blending modes and masking and is scalable to fit any size display delivering up to 16X FSAA of smooth rendering capabilities. This enables a wide variety of interactive content for the mobile industry that require minimal CPU capacity, is fast, scalable, and highly detailed.

At 3GSM, the Falanx Microsystems Mali55 pixel processor for mobile phones is featured in handsets using Zoran Corp processors. Mali55s high-performance, OpenGL ES 1.1 support, and flexibility raises the bar on multimedia quality the value mobile phone market, with OpenGL ES 1.1 accelerated handsets starting at $49.

The partnership between ALT Software and Hybrid Graphics will allow both companies to expand their customer base and product offerings by jointly providing system integration services,software products and more flexible and responsive customer support for graphics rendering on embedded devices using OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenVG and Java. Together their products address automotive, avionics, mobile, medical, and instrumentation markets.

The new NVIDIA GoForce 5500 handheld GPU offers console class 3D gaming using OpenGL ES and NVIDIA Pixel Shading Extensions delivering up to 2.6M triangles/second and 200M pixels/second and rendering up to 1024 X 768 screens. It also supports high-quality digital TV ( H.264, WMV9 and MPEG-4 video up to D1 resolution1 at 30 fps) , surround sound, hi-res photography, and low power consumption. Mobile phones with the 5500 GPU are expected by the end of 2006.

Khronos releases the royalty-free OpenMAX DL 1.0 specification to enable rapid implementation and seamless portability of optimized video, image and audio codecs on diverse silicon architectures. OpenMAX DL defines an API which contains a comprehensive set of audio, video and imaging functions that can be implemented and optimized on new processors by silicon vendors and then used by codec vendors to code a wide range of codec functionality. The OpenMAX DL API includes audio signal processing functions such as FFTs and filters, imaging processing primitives such as color space conversion and video processing primitives to enable the optimized implementation of codecs such as MPEG-4, H.264, MP3, AAC and JPEG. OpenMAX supports acceleration concurrency via both iDL, which uses OpenMAX IL constructs, and aDL which adds asynchronous interfaces to the OpenMAX DL API. Read press release.

Imagination Technologies has implemented full acceleration for OpenVG on the PowerVR MBX, achieving many times the performance of software implementations with significantly reduced power consumption. The new OpenVG acceleration along with OpenGL ES full 3D hardware acceleration of 32-bit pixel blending, hidden surface elimination, multi-texturing, anisotropic filtering and texture compression, will be shown at the companys stand at the 3GSM World Congress 2006 in Barcelona, Spain from 13-16 February 2006.

Falanx Microsystems will be showing OpenGL ES 2.0 support on its Mali200 mobile platform at 3GSM. The Mali200’s design delivers visually stunning graphics and video, can be easily customized to fit to virtually any platform - from handsets to laptops and game systems. It is the first GPU to show off OpenGL ES 2.0 in FPGA hardware. OpenGL ES 2.0 eliminates fixed functionality to reduce redundancy and enables fully programmable shaders, while conserving power consumption and increasing speed in next-generation cell phones and embedded systems.

Imagination Technologies will showcase the latest applications processors and development systems from its licensing partners, new OEM handsets using those application processors, and advanced multimedia content enabled by its PowerVR graphics and video cores at the 3GSM World Congress 2006 in Barcelona, Spain February 13-16. The list or participants is a virtual who’s who of mobile technology and games, including: Freescale, Intel, Renesas, Samsung, SKTelecom, Sony Ericsson, TI, Futuremark, HI Corp, TAT, Superscape, Esmertec, Dell, and Asphyr Media. The OpenGL ES-accelerated PowerVR MBX, delivers massive triangle and fill rates along with full 3D features such as skinning, FSAA, curved surfaces, per-pixel lighting and texture compression. PowerVR SGX delivers scalable and fully programmable shader graphics (OpenGL 2.0) and video functionality.

Imagination Technologies has released 3DMarkMobile06 benchmark results, under both Linux and Symbian operating systems with OpenGL ES 1.1, using the Texas Instruments OMAP2420 application processor, with PowerVR MBX running at 50/66 MHz (Symbian/Linux) and the CPU (ARM 1136) running at 300/266 MHz (Symbian/Linux). Measured system performance exceeds 37 frames per second on Game Test 1 for both OSs. 3DMarkMobile06 is designed specifically to benchmark system-level performance of next generation OpenGL ES 1.0 and 1.1 enabled mobile devices. The Game Tests in 3DMarkMobile06 are designed to stress mobile system hardware to the maximum, going several steps ahead of the current generation of mobile games.

COLLADA defines an XML-based schema to enable 3D authoring applications to freely exchange digital assets without loss of information, enabling interactive 3D industry content tools to be combined into extremely powerful tool chains. The specification is now available in Japanese (think PlayStation 3!).