DMP has just announced the OpenGL ES getting start course and the OpenGL ES advanced course for July 2009. Complete details for the advanced course are here, and complete details for the getting started course here.

The Khronos Group, Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative and recently added ElectricRain are sponsoring the ‘Champion the 3D Web using COLLADA’ contest. If you do 3D, and you can create a 3D model, avatar, world or simulation specifically geared toward virtual worlds, then head on over to the COLLADAContest. First prize is $5,000, a guest appearance at a future Immersive Education Initiative in-world (virtual) event, and a downloadable copy of Electric Rain’s Swift 3D. Complete rules can be found here. The contest will draw to close on July 15th and the winner will be announced at this years Siggraph 2009 in New Orleans—attendance is not required.

Remi Arnaud will be speaking on COLLADA at Metaverse U Conference on May 30th. Remi leads the Game Engine Technology team at Intel. This second iteration of the Metaverse U conference will take place at Stanford University this weekend on May 29th and 30th 2009. The goal is to explore the cutting edge applications of virtual worlds and the open platforms that drive them.

NVIDIA Corporation announced that its inaugural GPU Technology Conference will take place September 30 to October 2, 2009. The event will focus on how developers, engineers, and researchers are using the GPU to solve the world’s most important computing challenges. The conference will encompass three simultaneous events—the Emerging Companies Summit, the GPU Developer Summit, and the NVIDIA Research Summit. The GPU Developer Summit will be a 3-day series of technical presentations, tutorials and panels aimed at developers of consumer, professional and high performance computing applications looking to exploit more of the GPU’s parallel processing power using industry-standard languages such as C/C++ and Fortran as well as APIs such as Direct3D, DirectX Compute, OpenCL™ and OpenGL.

GUIliani is a C++ software MVC framework that supports XML which enabling the creation of platform independent, appealing graphical user interfaces for embedded systems. GUIliani supports many platforms such as Linux, VxWorks, WindowsCE, Windows Mobile, uCLinux and NIOS. Support back-end renderers include OpenGL-ES, SDL, GDI, GDI+, DirectFB and eVRU.

Bitmanagement announced the latest release of their 3D content viewer BS Contact 7.2 Web 3D. The 3D content viewer now supports all major browsers, IE, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome and Opera. The 3D internet software implements both the ISO standard definitions X3D and VRML as well as the industry standard COLLADA.

Vivante Corporation announced that a Taiwanese developer of high quality multimedia chipsets for mobile applications and a trusted supplier to global first-tier handset makers has added silicon proven Vivante scalable 2D and 3D graphics solutions to their system-on-chip (SoC) designs.

The new gDEBugger V5.1 adds the ability to view Vertex Buffer Objects (VBOs) data. The Textures and Buffers viewer Data View tab displays the selected VBO’s data in a spreadsheet. The user can select the displayed data format, offset and stride. 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.

Incoras Solutions Ltd today announced the full release of MediaDesigner version 1.2, Eclipse-based design and test workbench that dramatically reduces time-to-market, costs and risks in the development of multi-media products using the Khronos OpenMAX IL standard. As a contributing member of Khronos, Incoras Solutions has used its in-depth knowledge of the OpenMAX IL standard to develop a leading edge design tool that addresses a niche in the multi-media market.

The 12th Embedded Systems Expo (ESEC), the largest tradeshow and conference of embedded hardware & software for broad inustries inclduing consumer electronics, communication, design & engineering, automotive and R&D. Attending ESEC will be many Khronos Group members, including DMP, Fujitsu, HI, Mitsubishi Electric, NEC System Technologies, Renesas, Takumi and Toshiba.

Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc. and TAKUMI Corp. will demonstrate TAKUMI’s OpenVG®- and OpenGL® ES™-compliant GV500 core graphics accelerator technology integrated with Monotype Imaging’s iType® font engine at the ESEC Expo in Tokyo, May 13-15, 2009, booth East 42-7.

TAKUMI Corporation announced that the company has started licensing GV500 and GV300, TAKUMI’s new graphics accelerator IP core supporting 2D Vector Graphics for use mainly in mobile phones and digital consumer electronics products. Both IP cores support the API standards for embedded systems: GV500 supports both OpenGL ES1.1 and OpenVG1.1 while GV300 supports OpenVG1.1.

• GV500: Both 2D Vector Graphics and 3D graphics are supported
• GV300: Dedicated for 2D Vector Graphics

Inheriting high performance and small power consumption architecture from other existing GSHARK-TAKUMI IP cores, GV500 and GV300 are new products developed specifically for use in embedded systems including mobile phones, digital audio-visual home appliances and in-car displays.

Futuremark’s OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics benchmarking software has been upgraded to support new UI technologies for mobile devices. The enhanced version of 3DMarkMobile ES 2.0 adds two new tests focused on new UI scenarios. The software which is based on the “Kanzi” 3D engine, is designed to test next-generation mobile 3D hardware, and is equipped with “high detail game content.” The benchmark generates workloads that push the envelope of OpenGL ES 2.0 3D hardware, with a presentation that can be used for product demonstrations, the company adds.

Tech Soup announces its first OpenGL 3 training course, July 20-23, 2009, in Washington DC. The course covers new features in OpenGL 3, porting strategies, the OpenGL Shading Language, and 3D graphics concepts. Students learn the mechanisms behind fast, efficient, current 3D graphics with OpenGL 3 in a hands-on environment featuring several coding labs. Visit the Tech Soup web site to register online.

MeshLab is an open source, portable, and extensible system for the processing and editing of unstructured 3D triangular meshes. The system is aimed to help the processing of the typical not-so-small unstructured models arising in 3D scanning, providing a set of tools for editing, cleaning, healing, inspecting, rendering and converting this kind of meshes. Meshlab has supported COLLADA since 2006.