Packt Publishing has released a book from the developers of the Linderdaum Engine. The book contains recipes for portable game development techniques. A full chapter is devoted to the development of an abstraction layer on top of OpenGL 3, OpenGL ES 2 and OpenGL ES 3, which will allow mobile developers to run and debug their games on a desktop PC. In addition, the entire book source code may be downloaded from GitHub.

The San Francisco HTML5 user group is kicking off 2014 in style with a WebGL mega event featuring four great speakers. This special event will be live streamed on Google Developers Live. Speakers include Tony Parisi, Don Olmstead, Victor Sand and Peter Moskovits and Isaac Cohen. Details on the meetup page.

A bunch of companies are working with the Khronos Group to standardize some nuts and bolts of machine vision. It’s the kind of thing that could make it easier to write an augmented reality app for a mobile phone or sign-recognition software for an autonomous car, for example, because difficult low-level technology would be taken care of. The new standard is of course OpenVX, which is geared to make it easier for software to tap into some of those machine-vision functions.

OpenTK is a fast, low-level C# library that wraps OpenGL, OpenCL. The latest version adds strongly-typed enums for OpenGL 4.4 and OpenGL ES 3.0, and improves platform support via a brand-new SDL2 backend. Use it standalone or inside a UI on every major platform.

Imagination Technologies has announced a new camera Image Signal Processing (ISP) architecture codenamed ‘Raptor.’ Imagination designed the PowerVR Series2 ‘Raptor’ imaging pipeline architecture from the ground-up to be optimized for integration into next-generation System-on-Chips (SoCs) for a broad range of imaging and vision applications. ‘Raptor’ is also the first ISP designed to operate as a cooperative part of a heterogeneous computing platform for advanced functions and next-generation applications that will be compatible with OpenVX and other APIs used for computer vision.

As the CPUs and GPUs in mobile devices have become more powerful and devices with one or more high-resolution screen have become ubiquitous, the demand for complex interactions with the graphics driver has increased. In this latest blog post, Joe Davis from Imagination’s Developer Technology team discusses what multi-thread and multi-window OpenGL ES rendering means to developers, and describes if and when these techniques should be used in your apps.

The organisers of IWOCL 2014 announced details of the 2nd International Workshop on OpenCL and the opening of its call for submissions. Full details and information are available online.

This enables vastly improved performance as well as Construct 2’s awesome shader effects such as this ripple transition example. This alone can make for a much more mobile gaming experience in the browser. Firefox appears to support WebGL on all devices. However Chrome have taken a stricter approach, and only enable it on relatively new devices.

CogniVue, an innovator in embedded vision and strong supporter of OpenCL and OpenVX standards, recently announced that they had been selected as one of the Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX) Top-20 companies for their work on semiconductor processor technology IP and software that enables high-performance, low-power embedded vision applications for automotive, consumer, mobile and security markets.

The Khronos Group today announced the ratification and public release of the finalized OpenCL 2.0 specification. OpenCL 2.0 is a significant evolution of the open, royalty-free standard that simplifies cross-platform, parallel programming. With an enhanced execution model and a subset of the C11 and C++11 memory model, synchronization and atomic operations, OpenCL now enables a significantly richer range of algorithms and programming patterns to be easily accelerated with improved performance. Significant feedback from the developer community was incorporated into the final specification, following its provisional release in July. The OpenCL 2.0 specifications are available in the Khronos Registry.

The Khronos Group today announced the ratification and public release of the OpenVX 1.0 provisional specification, an open, royalty-free standard for cross platform acceleration of computer vision applications and libraries. OpenVX enables performance and power optimized computer vision algorithms for use cases such as face, body and gesture tracking, smart video surveillance, automatic driver assistance systems, object and scene reconstruction, augmented reality, visual inspection, robotics and more. The provisional release of the specification enables developers and implementers to provide feedback before specification finalization, which is expected within six months. The OpenVX 1.0 Provisional Specification Press Release is available on the Khronos Group website and the official feedback thread is available on the Khronos forums.

Altera Corporation announced the first successful demonstration of the Suricata Engine, an open-source Network Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDS/IPS) system. The demonstration shows an accelerated Suricata Engine on a Stratix V FPGA developed with the Altera SDK for OpenCL.

Xilinx and its ecosystem will showcase smarter data center solutions that leverage Vivado Design Suite and the portability of OpenCL programming language at Supercomputing Conference 2013 (SC13). Experts in Xilinx’s data center and design methodology groups will be conducting in-depth technical demonstrations that showcase: acceleration of Monte Carlo options pricing on x86 platform; high speed (HD 1080p) video processing on a Zynq®-7000 SoC platform; and OpenCL design environment for Xilinx FPGAs. To schedule a private appointment visit Xilinx at the Convey booth (#3547) or the Alpha Data booth (#4237).

When you login to your PS4 you are running WebGL code. The PlayStation Store, the Music and Video Applications, as well as a good chunk of UX are all rendered within the browser. Don Olmstead spent a good amount of time tuning the WebGL rendering engine, and he will be speaking at +SFHTML5 about how to optimize WebGL usage within the context of his work. There will be plenty of great tips on how you can speed up your own WebGL applications so get your slot now. And for those of you can’t make it in person it will be live streamed on Google Developers Live.

SC13 is just around the corner and The Khronos Group has a lot lined up. Visit Khronos in Booth #4137 to meet and talk with OpenCL experts and get your OpenCL reference card. If Birds of a Feather are more your style, there is also a BOF lined up for November 20th with Tim Mattson, Ben Bergen, Simon McIntosh-Smith, giving you a chance to meet colleagues working with OpenCL and share best practices in OpenCL programming. Also learn about next year’s plans for IWOCL (International Workshop on OpenCL).