If you were unable to make it to the 2012 SIGGRAPH LA, and you really wanted to see the Khronos Groups Birds of a Feather sessions (BOFs), now you can. Presentation slides, videos, photos and more, are now online. A special thank you goes out to the Gold and Silver sponsors of the OpenGL 20th anniversary party: AMD, Google, NVIDIA, DMP, Imagination, Intel, Lucasfilm and R3

With the release of Mozilla’s Firefox 15, comes a new demo ‘The BananaBread’, a 3D first-person shooter. This demo offers a compelling example of what developers can presently achieve with WebGL and compressed textures. The BananaBread engine is a JavaScript and WebGL port of the 3D game engine used in Cube 2: Sauerbraten. The initial port was accomplished by a Mozilla researcher using Emscripten, a sophisticated LLVM-based tool for transpiling conventional C/C++ code into JavaScript.

PGI, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Khronos member STMicroelectronics updated the PGCL OpenCL framework for multi-core ARM-based Systems-on-Chips (SoCs).

Version 1.0.0 of the free open-source, cross-platform 3D application framework PixelLight has been released. We’re using OpenGL as well as GLSL within our main-renderer and OpenGL ES 2.0 for Android. The primary focus of this release was on quality assurance. On the graphics side, tesselation as well as instancing support was added to the rendering system. Further we added the capability of rendering volume data.

Mikael Bourges-Sevenier of Motorola-Mobility will be talking on three WebGL and WebCL modules that he’s written for Node, and Nathan Rajlich of LearnBoost will be talking on node-gyp. Details and signup are available on the Meetup site.

Brown Deer Technology provides highly specialized technical support to the HPC efforts of government and commercial organizations ranging from the Department of Defense to companies in the Oil & Gas industry. The CO-PRocessing THReads (COPRTHR) SDK created by Brown Deer provides several OpenCL related libraries and tools that simplify the use of heterogeneous computing platforms for developers targeting GPU compute technology and hybrid CPU/GPU computing architectures.

Adapteva Inc. has released an OpenCL compiler for its Epiphany multicore floating–point processor. The company hopes the open source tool will help expand its addressable market as it begins sampling a 28 nm version of its chip.

WebGL editor CopperCube version 3.5 has been released. It has a redesigned user interface and includes the long awaited support for unicode (the ability to use texts, 2D Overlays and files in non-Ascii languages like Russian, Korean, Japanese etc). Also, the WebGL renderers speed has been improved, and the internal JavaScript physics engine now runs more efficiently. A 14 day trial version of the editor is also available.

The Computing Language Utility (CLU) is a lightweight API designed to help programmers explore, learn, and rapidly prototype programs with OpenCL. This API reduces the complexity associated with initializing OpenCL devices, contexts, kernels and parameters, etc. while preserving the ability to drop down to the lower level OpenCL API at will when programmers wants to get their hands dirty. The CLU release includes an open source implementation along with documentation and samples that demonstrate how to use CLU in real applications. It has been tested on Windows 7 with Visual Studio. The original slide presentation from SIGGRAPH is available in the developer section on the Khronos website.

Neil Trevett, President of the Khronos Group, will be hosting a tutorial on Mobile SoC programming at the upcoming Hot Chips symposium on High Performance Chips. Along with several other companies, this event will be held at The Flint Center for the Performing Arts, in Cupertino, CA, on August 27-29, 2012. Complete details are available here.

Net.tutsplus has released Part II of the WebGL Essentials tutorial. Walking you through the basics in part one, part two covers transformations and object importing, as well as reviews OpenGL objects.

Net.tutsplus has released Part III of the WebGL Essentials tutorial. Building on part one and two, this third installment covers Lighting and 2.5D.

Neil Trevett and Philipp Slusallek from the University of Saarland will be editors of an IEEE CG&A Theme issue on Web3D due in the new year. “We have a relatively short window for submissions,” said Neil, when he announced at SIGGRAPH they are currently looking for WebGL-related submissions. Contact Neil directly at his .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) for more details.

The Khronos Group has funded a $20K project to fix OpenCOLLADA bugs. This RFQ is open to anyone who wants to bid. An RFQ PDF is available right now online. Khronos is looking to finalize the vendor selection in September.

The Khronos Group has posted most of the slide presentations from the SIGGRAPH BOFs online. Slide sets include COLLADA, OpenCL, OpenGL, OpenGL ES and WebGL. Developers will be particularly interested in these slides which include overviews of OpenGL 4.3, OpenGL ES 3.0 and CLU extension. There is also the slide deck from Kurt Akeley.