TransGaming Inc, a leading developer of portability and graphics technologies has become a Khronos™ Group Contributing Member, joining over one hundred industry leading technology companies. TransGaming will participate and vote with all Members in the ongoing development and promotion of open standards for the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on platforms ranging from embedded systems to high-performance desktop and workstation systems.

NewTek, Inc., announced LightWave® v9.5, a major update to its award-winning 3D application. LightWave® v9.5 new capabilities include COLLADA support as well as a complete hair and fur solution, new lighting system and many improvements to animation, global illumination, rendering and workflow.

Wind River’s VxWorks 653 integrated multiple avionics (IMA) platform allows sophisticated display functions to be easily integrated into time and space-partitioned systems using standard COTS platforms. The integration between Esterel and Wind River products includes qualified code generation, verification and enhanced support for OpenGL SC, safety-critical graphics in the deployed system.

Rémi Arnaud and Mark Barnes will deliver a presentation on the latest COLLADA specification, COLLADA 1.5 from the Khronos Group. Expect to see and hear about the latest content, applications, technologies and ever growing organizations adopting COLLADA today. Rémi and Mark both work in advanced visual computing in the Visual Computing Software Division (VCSD) within Intel’s Software Solutions Group where they are leading the Game Engine Technology team.

On february 19th, Neil Trevett, President of The Khronos Group, gave a presentation at the 2008 Game Developers Conference. Of all the presentations given Neil’s “Strategic Briefing: Khronos Mobile Graphics Ecosystem” presentation came in at fourth place of the five most highly rated GDC MOBILE 2008 talks. Congratulation Neil! The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs to enable the authoring and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices, including OpenGL, OpenKODE, OpenMAX and many more.

Based on OpenSceneGraph 2.2 the viewer is ideal for rendering COLLADA FX output from RenderMonkey 1.8. As well as including a binary viewer, the release has comprehensive instructions on how to build the viewer using OpenSceneGraph 2.2, and the COLLADA DOM. The project is a useful starting point for developers wanting to support COLLADA OpenGL effect content in their asset pipeline.

ESRI’s upcoming ArcGIS 9.3 software release will include support for the Collaborative Design Activity (COLLADA) file format. Using these new capabilities, ArcGIS users will be able to leverage COLLADA files for a variety of purposes in ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Server as well as display more realistic 3D models.

Bob Kuehne of Blue Newt Software and Paul Martz of Skew Matrix Software are pleased to announce that registration is now open for three OpenSceneGraph (OSG) training courses in Paris, France, April 25-30, 2008. These three courses will provide developers with a complete OSG education.

The free iPhone SDK released to the public contains OpenGL ES. SuperMonkeyBall and Spore are already ported and they run great.

Aika is a simple yet powerful Game Engine written in C++ without any platform dependence. You can use Aika on several platforms including Nintendo DS and Symbian. Aika uses OpenGL as the main render due to its ease of use and powerful API, and COLLADA as the main input data file format. The main proposal of the engine is to create a portable and easy of use framework to create multimedia content.

OpenGL ES is a cross-platform API for full-function 2D and 3D graphics on embedded systems - including amusement machines, car info-tainment systems, mobile phones, game consoles, and digital appliances. This course provides the knowledge that a novice OpenGL ES programmer needs to author interactive, 3D graphics applications using OpenGL ES. It covers fundamental topics such as overview of architecture, modeling, and lighting, and introduces advanced topics using extensions such as matrix palette skinning animation.