“COLLADA in the Game” “Remi Arnaud of Intel, and co-creator of the COLLADA standard, will lead panelists in a discussion on how their COLLADA usage is meeting the demanding requirements for the most compelling content and increasing user experiences. Panelists will also be asked what sort of advanced capabilities they need the hardware to provide that will enhance their ability to deliver exciting games.”

Folks on at atoker.com have been hard at work on getting Cairo’s GTK of the Open Source WebKit to render straight to OpenGL with Cairo’s new OpenVG backend and ShivaVG. The results have been excellent so far with more improvements expected.

Imagination Technologies announced that its POWERVR graphics acceleration technology is the world’s first to pass the Khronos™ conformance tests for OpenVG™ 1.0.1. Imagination has completed conformance testing of their OpenVG implementation using the official Khronos conformance test suite, and has achieved a 100% successful pass rate for all tests. Khronos formally approved Imagination’s claim for OpenVG 1.0.1 conformance on January 10th 2008.

Web3D has made a call for papers for the Web3D 2008 International Symposium at SIGGRAPH 2008 in Los Angeles, California. The Web3d Symposium will address a wide range of topics on creating and using new 3D Web and Multimedia technologies like X3D, VRML, COLLADA, Croquet, MPEG4, MPEG7, Java3D, and Canvas3D. Authors are invited to submit their research and applications papers be they short or full papers for review by the international Program Committee. The papers must be innovative and contribute to the advancement of 3D Multimedia technologies on the Web.

BS Contact release 7.1 is now available for trial download. The COLLADA format joins the existing VRML and X3D modeling languages already supported. Professional designers can now prepare their 3D models online distribution from their favourite tools such as Google Sketchup, Cinema 4D, Maya, and more.

A COLLADA viewer based on modified version of Away 3D. The component was put together to support viewing 3D models based on the COLLADA standard within a Flex application. Some of the changes included: Implement a flex component for the AWAY3d rendering engine; Hover/Zoom navigation support using custom targeted hover camera (hold down shift OR ctrl on top of the model viewer); Added simple material and lighting support to the COLLADA parser; Added materials preloading support.

SGI has posted three new OpenGL course for the 2008 year. The OpenGL Programming course helps applications programmers master platform-independent graphics programming using OpenGL. Students learn to view and model in 3D, and to create animated, wire frame and solid geometry, under interactive control from input devices. Students add lighting, textures, and other effects to increase realism.

ARM announced 18 ARM Partners are now utilizing products from its Mali(tm) graphics portfolio. The ARM(R) Mali55(tm) and ARM Mali200(tm) GPUs have been licensed by nine SoC vendors including Micronas Inc. and Zoran, since their launch at 3GSM in 2007. In addition, the ARM Mali-JSR184(tm) 3D graphics engine has been licensed by nine leading OEM licensees including Samsung Electronics. In addition to providing content developers with the state-of-the-art programmable features in OpenGL ES 2.0 Mali products also support SVG and Flash through OpenVG for improved text, navigation, UI and web-browsing experiences.

AMD has released RenderMonkey v1.80 which adds support for COLLADA. RenderMonkey v1.80 includes a COLLADA OpenGL Effects exporter that exports effects using the COLLADA FX Profile_GLSL. RenderMonkey v1.80 also includes a COLLADA Mesh Importer for importing meshes into a RenderMonkey workspace. AMD has also released a modified version of the OpenSceneGraph Viewer that can load and display COLLADA Profile_GLSL Effects.

Gary Smith has posted a great year end wrap up on COLLADA. Highlighting where COLLADA came from and where he sees it might be going in the GIS industry. A short but effective read.