The COLLADA working group announces that it has delivered on key objectives agreed with the COLLADA community over the last year. By working with NetAllied, the OpenCOLLADA open-source importer/exporter has been significantly upgraded to provide proven, robust operation and hosted on GitHub for free and easy adoption by tools vendors and the COLLADA community. The OpenCOLLADA SDK offers direct write and parsing import capabilities, and robust support for full COLLADA import/export, which is superior to many commercial solutions. The COLLADA working group also announced the formation of the new “glTF” project to define a final stage OpenGL Transmission Format to enable rapid delivery and loading of 3D content by OpenGL®, OpenGL ES or WebGL™ APIs. More details are available in the press release.

The Khronos Group today announces that multiple WebGL 1.0.1 implementations are now fully conformant on a range of desktop and mobile platforms – with many more to follow. In addition, the WebGL 1.0.2 specification and a set of extensions have been submitted for ratification and are expected to be formally released in April 2013.

The Khronos™ Group today announces that COLLADA™ 1.5.0 has been published as an official ISO standard to provide a reliable, long-term international standard for 3D asset authoring and interchange. ISO SC4 TC184 has published ISO/PAS 17506 to enable developers to create tools to process COLLADA resources to import to or export from digital content creation (DCC) applications, 3D interactive applications and tool chains, prototyping tools and real-time visualization applications.

The Khronos Group announces that the full COLLADA Test Suite is now ported to GitHub and is free to use to exhaustively test the quality of any COLLADA importer/exporter, with a full tutorial on how to use the test suite.

Collabora has announced the release of their GStreamer OpenMax IL wrapper plug-in for the GStreamer 1.x multimedia framework. The new plug-in release by Collabora supports the stable GStreamer 1.x API/ABI with a generic OpenMAX IL implementation as well as special support for the OpenMAX features of the Raspberry Pi. (News via Phoronix)

Khronos has announced a Request For Quote for a WebCL Kernel Validator. The Validator will enforce compliance of WebCL kernels with the defined WebCL language restrictions, and prevent out of bounds memory accesses. The WebCL kernel Validator will enforce out of bounds memory protections, and will perform syntactic validation of WebCL kernels. Details are available online in PDF format.

World Wide Maze is a pretty basic ball-rolling game, but at it’s core is something quite interesting. The first is a link to the mobile version of Chrome that turns your smartphone into a PC game controller. The second is of course that World Wide Maze works off the WebGL standard, and it requires pretty decent system specs for a browser game, including 1GB of RAM and a 256MB graphics card for hardware acceleration.

Udacity and Autodesk are now offering a MOOC on the basics of interactive 3D graphics. A MOOC is a massive open (i.e. free) online course. The self-paced course is based on WebGL through the popular three.js library. 19,000 people have signed up so far.

Version 4.2 of the open-source, cross-platform volume visualization tool Voreen is now available for download. This version brings significant performance optimizations, stereoscopic rendering, a OpenCL-based 3D random walker implementation for interactive volume segmentation, and extended visual debugging features of the network editor.

DiSTI’s GL Studio ES will be utilized by Jaguar Land Rover company-wide as the tool for all embedded HMI prototyping and to develop graphical user interfaces in the creation of Infotainment Centers and Rear Seat Entertainment Systems in their vehicles. GL Studio ES enables a seamless transition from prototyping, to testing, and to the deployment of graphical interfaces on embedded systems. The latest version includes a 3ds Max plug-in toolkit and a deployment capability for OpenGL ES (including Apple’s iOS).

Intel has submitted several resources to the OpenCL resource page. The Khronos Group Resource pages are open to the community to submit their own resources. Each of Khronos technologies has it’s own resource page.

This article introduces how to use OpenGL ES on the Android platform through either the software development kit (SDK) or the Android Native Development Toolkit (NDK) and how to decide which approach to use. The various OpenGL ES sample apps in the SDK and NDK are described as well as the Java* Native Interface (JNI), which allows you to combine Java and C/C++ components. How you decide whether you should target OpenGL ES version 1.1 or 2.0 is also discussed.

Brought to you in partnership with Autodesk, this class will teach you about the basic principles of 3D computer graphics: meshes, transforms, cameras, materials, lighting, and animation. By the end of this class you will know enough to make an animated 3D demo program that runs in a web browser, while also understanding the basic principles of how realistic computer images are generated. Course Instructors are Eric Haines from Autodesk and Gundega Dekena.

OpenGL SuperBible, Sixth Edition is the definitive programmer’s guide, tutorial, and reference for the world’s leading 3D API for real-time computer graphics, OpenGL 4.X. The best all-around introduction to OpenGL for developers at all levels of experience, it clearly explains both the API and essential associated programming concepts. Readers will find up-to-date, hands-on guidance on all facets of modern OpenGL development, including transformations, texture mapping, shaders, advanced buffers, geometry management, and much more. Fully revised!

The Boston WebGL Meet-up is looking for a new organizer. As Meetup.com points out, “Without an Organizer, it will disappear from our website in 12 day(s).” Anyone in the Boston area who is interested, is urged to contact the Meetup group. The Khronos Group would also love to have a Chapter Leader in the Boston area.