Samsung, Qualcomm, ARM, Broadcom, and a bunch of other technology companies want your computer to see. To that end, they banded together at the Khronos Group to try to standardize some elements of machine vision technology. 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.

videantis announced it has joined the Khronos Group to bring support for the OpenVX computer vision acceleration API to its low power, licensable v-MP4000HDX processor architecture. Computer vision is the key technology that drives new applications such as always-on smart mobile cameras, gesture-based interfaces, 3D-sensing games, and automotive driver assistance systems.

Shaderific 3.1 is now available. Shaderific is an educational app for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch that helps computer science students and experienced developers to get started with OpenGL ES 2.0 shader development. The update adds a new stereoscopy mode that allows to render any shader as anaglyph red-cyan 3D images. This provides a completely new 3D experience when using glasses with the appropriate red-cyan filters. Furthermore, multiple instances of the same object can now be rendered with a single shader using the new draw instanced functionality.

Khronos Group members DMP and CogniVue ink important licensing agreement. DMP will be licensing CogniVue’s APEX Image Cognition Processing (ICP) technology.

WebGL, Emscripten, asm.js and Web Audio API are a few technologies that ensure that the Web offers the best and most complete platform for gaming possible. To showcase these technologies, Mozilla and Goo Technologies are looking for budding game creators to show us their creative genius. To create your games, you will be using the Goo platform consisting of Goo Engine – a 3D JavaScript gaming engine entirely built on WebGL/HTML5 – and Goo Create – a visual editing tool running on top of the engine. There are three categories and everyone is welcome: Best Amateur Interactive Game Scene, Best Desktop Game and Best Mobile Game.

Maxthon says that the new rendering engine and other tweaks to the Maxthon browser make it 10% faster overall than Chrome 30, and has 40% faster start times than previous versions. The Maxthon browser includes broad and deep HTML5 suppor as well as support for WebGL & GPU acceleration allowing for improved graphics and image processing. As well, the browser allows multi-threaded downloads and a promise to use the smallest amount of RAM of any web browser.

CopperCube is ideal for creating 3D educational programs, architectural visualizations, military simulations, product configurators, games, e-learning applications and 3D prototypes. The most recent release now offers WebGL support for Internet Explorer 11.

The Altera SDK for OpenCL has made the 2013 EDN Hot 100 list in the category of Boards & Development Tools. The EDN 100 highlights the electronics industry’s most significant products of the year based on innovation, significance, usefulness and popularity. For more information visit 2013 EDN Hot 100 or Altera’s SDK for OpenCL.

NORAD has now switched allegiance and will use Bing Maps, as this year’s site has been developed in partnership with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team. The company has optimised the site for touchscreen devices and is using 3D technology with WebGL to provide a “more realistic-looking version of Santa’s Village and Santa’s trek across the world”.

The Khronos Group has provisionally released OpenVX 1.0, a new standard for computer Vision acceleration (or X-celeration) on hardware (GPU, DSP, FPGA, etc). We need feedback from developers and researchers to understand what changes, if any people would like to see before final specification. Please leave feedback at the Khronos Forums so all the member companies can see it.

Hands On OpenCL is a two-day lecture course introducing OpenCL, the API for writing heterogeneous applications. Provided are slides for around twelve lectures, plus some appendicies, complete with Examples and Solutions in C, C++ and Python. The lecture series finishes with information on porting CUDA applications to OpenCL.

@notch of Minecraft fame is now working on a WebGL app. As pointed out by Brandon Jones, Notch is demonstrating the ability to ramp up quickly in todays age of coding.