AMD today announced its collaboration with Mixamo on the launch of Face Plus, an advanced real-time motion capture and 3D facial animation technology for the Unity game engine. Face Plus was developed for devices that support OpenCL™ 1.1 or newer versions.

Imagination Technologies has implemented a set of image and video handling extensions to the EGL Native Platform Interface to enable developers to create high-performance GPU compute applications on the new low-cost Hardkernel ODROID-XU development system. The new OpenCL API extensions enable developers to implement Instagram-like functionality on real-time camera data, including computational photography and video processing, while offloading the main CPU by providing resource sharing and interoperability between the camera pipeline, OpenGL ES graphics and OpenCL compute APIs. Imagination will be releasing the PowerVR GPU compute SDK and programming guidelines for PowerVR Series5XT GPUs and there is an upcoming release of the popular PowerVR Graphics SDK v3.2 featuring OpenCL support in PVRTrace for PowerVR Series6 GPUs.

This Khronos Group Chapter meetup will be held on Thursday 31st October 2013 and is one of the free sessions offered by the Mosaic3DX conference and exhibition this year. The Khronos UK Chapter is a group of the UK’s Khronos API users enabling them to get together and expand understanding of the APIs, discuss ideas to improve them, and share technical achievements in the graphics/multimedia/compute domains. At Mosaic3DX this year, we would like to hear about your experiences developing games using APIs such as OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and OpenCL and thoughts on what you’d want to see in future versions. Expect some interesting presentations and a heated discussion!

Autodesk has introduced Maya LT, an affordably priced but powerful 3D animation tool for indie game developers. Through support for FBX export, Maya LT can be used for game engines like Unity Engine and Unreal Engine and content creation for Second Life. The FBX converter can export from Maya LT into Collada DAE format.

Marcus Kruger from Goo Technologies discusses why he and his company see WebGL and HTML5 as the future of gaming… in the cloud.

Intel submitted a branch of the 3D graphics open source driver (Mesa), and is certified for compliance to the OpenGL ES 3.0 3D Graphics specification for the 3rd Generation Intel Core platform. This specification is expected to be used by many mobile Linux based operating systems in the near future.

CopperCube, the WebGL 3D editor for creating interactive 3D apps and websites has just been released in version 4.2. It now supports normal maps, import of Blender .blend files, using precalculated lightmaps, includes WebGL performance improvements, and much more. A detailed list of the changes in this free update can be viewed on the website.

Jon Peddie from Jon Peddie Research has published a new book “The History of Visual Magic in Computers: How Beautiful Images are Made in CAD, 3D, VR and AR.” If you have ever looked at a fantastic adventure or science fiction movie, or an amazingly complex and rich computer game, or a TV commercial where cars or gas pumps or biscuits behaved liked people and wondered, “How do they do that?”, then you’ve experienced the magic of 3D worlds generated by a computer. This book will guide you through the history of how this came about and show you a little about how it’s all done. Dr. Jon Peddie is one of the pioneers of the graphics industry and was recently named one of the most influential analysts.

The first Architecture, Engineering, Construction Hackathon. The AEC Hackathon is using open source and open standard technologies to develop the AEC Hackathon’s software solutions—cloud-based solutions are encouraged. Some data sets and API’s (REST, REST3D, etc.) will be distributed before the event for all registered attendees. Technologies being encouraged include 3D Gaming, BIM, XML, iOS, Android, HTML5/javascript among others. Running from November 8th to 10th this fall, space is quickly filling up, so hurry to get your tickets!

Time for web developers to learn WebGL. A great little demo showing off a possible real world use of WebGL.

PoCL is aiming at becoming an efficient open source (MIT-licensed) implementation of the OpenCL 1.2 (and soon OpenCL 2.0) standard. This release adds support for LLVM/Clang 3.3, employs inner loop parallelization in the kernel compiler, uses Vecmathlib for inlineable efficient math library implementations, contains plenty of bug fixes, and provides several new OpenCL API implementations.

Dr Rémi Arnaud from AMD offers a great review the WebGL community and a round up of just how fast WebGL is catching on, from SIGGRAPH 2013. “The SIGGRAPH 2013 WebGL BOF definitely had the kind of energy and vibrant community that I took for granted when at Silicon Graphics, but have since learned is rare. WebGL is an enabler;” writes Remi.

The AMD library team has spent the last three years working on APPML – the Accelerated Parallel Processing Math Library. APPML contains an OpenCL implementation of BLAS and FFT routines. The library enables developers to accelerate common scientific and engineering computations on APUs and discrete graphics accelerators.

HPC programmers who are tired of managing low-level details when using OpenCL or CUDA to write general purpose applications for GPUs (GPGPU) may be interested in Harlan, a new declarative programming language designed to mask the complexity and eliminate errors common in GPGPU application development. The idea with Harlan is to keep developers focused on the high-level HPC programming challenge at hand, instead of getting bogged down with the nitty gritty details of GPU development and optimization. Harlan’s syntax is based on the language Scheme, and compiles to Khronos Group’s OpenCL.

AutoQ3D is a full CAD application that let you make a lot of things in 2D & 3D. AutoQ3D CAD is easy to use and fast for everybody and has published a new 3D algebra which can replace the quaternions. The fast and light CAD editor is available in your favorite platform thanks to the use of OpenGL and OpenGL ES. AutoQ3D CAD Runs on Mac, iPad & iPhone, Android, Windows and Linux.