The Khronos Group and the Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative are thrilled to announce the first-ever COLLADA content development contest. In concert with the Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative, Khronos invites you to champion the application of 3D technology from video games and digital media services towards virtual worlds and Immersive Education. All entries must contain original content made for any 3D web based application that can import models stored in either COLLADA .dae documents or .zae archive formats. Your content will consist of a 3D model, avatar, world or simulation specifically geared toward virtual worlds and deployable in Immersive Education platforms. First prize is five thousand dollars. There are no entry fees, so why not enter today. Complete rules can be found here.
SceneCaster has partnered with mental images, a wholly owned subsidiary of NVIDIA, to bring the latter’s RealityServer 3D platform to bear on its virtual scenes. The technology is integrated into 3D Scenes, a Flash-based network for creating social scenes which was just launched on Friendster last week. RealityServer allows COLLADA as a scene format which puts it in line with SceneCaster’s production pipeline.
Vivante Corporation announced that the Microprocessor Research and Development Center (MPRC) of Peking University (Beijing, China) selected Vivante 2D/3D GPU IP technology for its Single-Chip-PC SoC Platform, placing the graphics power of OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenGL ES 1.1, and OpenVG in an affordable, 3C computer for schools. “With the Vivante graphics processor and Khronos open standards APIs, we can provide modern graphics applications to benefit education for both teaching and research.” said Professor Cheng Xu, Director of the MPRC, Peking University.
Google’s O3D API is an open-source JavaScript API for creating interactive 3D graphics applications that run in a browser window and targets web developers comfortable with Javascript and having some experience with 3D graphics. The sample COLLADA converter will let you import content from applications such as Autodesk 3Ds Max, Maya and Google SketchUp.
Google released an experimental browser plugin which lets you display rich 3D graphics in Web content. Google hopes this plugin will contribute to the new 3D Web work group managed by the Khronos Group and backed by Mozilla and Google itself. With Google’s contribution and participation in this effort to build 3D Web standards it looks like this concept is gaining traction. There has been some confusion over Google releasing this API and whether it is meant to derail the efforts of Khronos and Mozilla. On the contrary, from Google’s own blog, “Google plans to contribute technology and web development expertise to the discussion within Khronos and the broader development community.”
Cap Digital and Imaginove are sponsoring a one-day event on Monday, May 11th, 2009 in Paris France to help developers test their COLLADA importers and exporters. If you are into COLLADA, come on over and join COLLADA developers and test your tool’s interoperability! Along with your peers, you will have a chance to mingle with COLLADA Experts Remi Arnaud from Intel and Mark Barnes from Expert Support co-creators of COLLADA, Luc Bolduc (AutoDesk), Steffen Lips and Sebastian Kieble (Netallied.de), Nicolas Perret (Omegame) and Rita Turkowski (Intel). Registration is required on the plugfest homepage.
Chingiz Dyussenov proposal to improve COLLADA support in Blender has been accepted as one of the six Google Summer of Code 2009 projects for the Blender 3D modeler.
Avid® unveiled version 5.2 of Avid Deko® 3000, an on-air graphics package that supports the industry-standard FBX and COLLADA formats. This enables customers to easily import and playback a broader range of 3D models and animations from leading applications such as Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Softimage 7.5 and MAXON CINEMA 4D. “By using proven industry interchange formats like COLLADA and FBX, Avid is providing tremendous incentive for customers to invest in the new Deko offerings,” said Jeff Sargeant, a 3D artist and the creative director of design firm, Sargeant Inc.
NVIDIA Corporation announced the release of its OpenCL driver and software development kit (SDK) to developers participating in its OpenCL Early Access Program. NVIDIA is providing this release to solicit early feedback in advance of a beta release which will be made available to all GPU Computing Registered Developers in the coming months.
The new gDEBugger V5.0 adds support for OpenGL 3.0 and OpenGL’s new deprecation model. A new Deprecated Function Statistics tab was added to the Statistics viewer. This tab displays information about deprecated functions and deprecated behaviors used by the debugged application. This tab also suggests forward-compatible replacements to each deprecated feature. gDEBugger V5.0 also includes gDEBugger for Apple Mac OS X. This new product brings all of gDEBugger’s Debugging and Profiling abilities to the Mac OpenGL developer’s world. gDEBugger, an OpenGL and OpenGL ES debugger and profiler, traces application activity on top of the OpenGL API, lets programmers see what is happening within the graphic system implementation to find bugs and optimize OpenGL application performance. gDEBugger runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems.
Google announced that they are changing the way COLLADA and Google Earth files from the Google 3D Warehouse are served up. Currently, Google Earth files in the 3D Warehouse are simple ‘wrappers’ around COLLADA 3D model files, and up until now, they’ve simply provided the COLLADA (and consequently, the Google Earth) files that SketchUp has produced. Google has changed things so that soon after you upload a file, a COLLADA/Google Earth file is generated on the server using the provided SketchUp file. The big news is that every model in the 3D Warehouse will now be available in the COLLADA format.
TES announces the availability of D/AVE 3D, HW 3D IP for integration into ASIC and FPGAs. D/AVE 3D supports industry standrad OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenVG 1.01 API for use in Automotive, Mobile, Avionics and Industrial devices . D/AVE 3D offers high performance per-primitive anti-aliasing, texture compression,edge-based filtering, A VSP ( Vertex Stream Processor ) that enables OpenGL ES 2.0 like vertex shader support. D/AVE 3D supports high performance of upto 16 Million triangles/sec and 266 mega pixels/sec fill rates on ASICS. With complete end-to-end solutions in embedded graphics customers of D/AVE are enabled with support for developing enhanced GUI with Guiliani, 3D MAP Sandbox and Graphics evaluation boards. This General availability of D/AVE 3D comes after successful licensing of D/AVE 3D by NEC Electronics.
The Khronos Group has awarded a contract for the final development of the COLLADA 1.4 conformance suite. The conformance suite will allow Khronos Adopters to test their COLLADA 1.4 implementations and earn a badge for either Baseline, Superior or Exemplary conformance. These badges represent increasing levels of support for COLLADA features and robust interoperability among conforming applications. End users will benefit by using tools with known levels of conformance for the features they need from the best products on the market. This contract will build off the recent contribution from Intel that greatly improved the test suite and framework.
Mark Barnes, COLLADA working group chair says “Development of the COLLADA conformance suite is the work group’s top priority for 2009. It’s essential for us to foster a healthy COLLADA ecosystem of tools and applications for artists and developers working with open content pipelines.”
Yumetech has been awarded the contract in an open bid process. Yumetech specializes in the creation of open standards and open source software for 3D graphics development. The company has prior experience developing portions of the X3D conformance suite and is a current member of Khronos and participates in the COLLADA working group.
“Yumetech is committed to the development of open standard 3D graphics solutions. This contract aligns well with our vision of providing open content pipelines for our customers’ data. It allows us to further improve both the COLLADA standard and provides the value of data portability required by our customers”, says Alan Hudson, President Yumetech.
The availability of the COLLADA within the Khronos Adopter’s package has been planned for August 2009.
“Nucleus Multimedia Services” is an implementation of the OpenMAX IL standard for Nucleus Real Time OS. It ships with a fully functional library of standard components which allow common audio/video playback configurations.