The creators of Vanda Engine have released a set of tutorials covering conversions from Maya and 3ds Max to COLLADA. Vanda Engine is open source and freely available for all to use.

NVIDIA has provided a set of OpenGL and OpenGL ES examples illustrating various techniques and features to use in your own code. The GameWorks examples are aimed more at game developers, and run on Windows, Linux and Android. They are broken down by topic. The “NVIDIA Professional Visualization” set of examples are OpenGL based, and aimed more at the professional workstation developers. The repository is new, so expect more samples to be published soon. Linux support is being worked on. You can find the examples on Github.

Have you heard about the next generation OpenGL initiative? Khronos Group is designing a ground-up, cross-platform API to enable direct access to modern GPUs. We think this is a pretty big deal and we are seeking community input on the name for this new API. Please take a few minutes to take our survey. Your input along with that of others will help guide the naming of this significant initiative.

The 10th HiPEAC conference will take place in Amsterdam, The Netherlands from Monday, January 19 to Wednesday, January 21, 2015. HiPEAC is an academic oriented, 3-day, international conference around HPC, compilers and processors. Associated workshops, tutorials, special sessions, several large poster session and an industrial exhibition will run in parallel with the conference.

The call for submissions for the 3rd IWOCL is now open, seeking research papers, technical presentations, workshops, tutorials and posters from industry and academia. Submissions may relate directly to the use of OpenCL, SYCL or SPIR as well as libraries, toolkits and programming techniques based on OpenCL. Submissions may refer to both completed projects or those currently in progress. Submission deadline: 14th February 2015.

Mozilla has released the latest version of its browser, Firefox version 35.0 which adds support for the EXT_blend_minmax WebGL extension. As well as many other changes of course.

Xilinx, Inc. announced that the SDAccel development environment for OpenCL, C, and C++ is now Khronos OpenCL 1.0 standard compliant. The OpenCL standard provides a uniform programming environment for software developers to write efficient, portable code enabling a rich range of algorithms to be easily accelerated on Xilinx FPGAs. SDAccel, the newest member of the SDx family, includes an architecturally optimizing compiler for OpenCL, C, and C++ and is proven to deliver up to 25X better performance/watt compared to CPUs or GPUs and 3X the performance and resource efficiency of other FPGA solutions.

After four pre-releases, the stable 2.0.0 version of cf4ocl, the C Framework for OpenCL, is now available. Since the last beta release, a number of tests were added, and a few bug fixes have been fixed. Support for device fission and native kernels has also been implemented. A complete list of features and fixes is available online. Cf4ocl has been tested on Linux, OS X and Windows, and offers a pure C object-oriented framework for developing and benchmarking OpenCL projects in C.

If you’re interested in WebGL development, then you might enjoy My forays into JavaScript by Stavros Papadopoulos. A white paper, WebGL GUI library, and terrain rendering engine all rolled into one. The GUI toolkit is desktop and Android inspired, but it’s rendered with WebGL. There’s a live demo that loads chunks of terrain data as you fly around – the terrain is rendered offline by a Delphi program.

AMD’s first high-performance system-on-a-chip (SoC) and next-generation Mobile APU codenamed “Carrizo” showcased at CES 2015. Expected in market by mid-year, “Carrizo” will arrive with support for next-generation APIs such as DirectX 12 and OpenCL 2.0.

OmniVision Technologies announced the availability of an OpenCL optimized imaging algorithm library ideally suited for ARM Mali GPUs. The library includes advanced imaging features such as 3D noise suppression, chroma noise reduction, de-fringe and de-haze and is targeted at smartphones, tablets and notebooks.

The Immersive Technology Alliance (ITA) is currently forming working groups to make effective quality assurance and software compatibility standards for virtual reality (VR) devices. Defined industry standards will allow content makers to confidently produce experiences for all immersive solutions and community platforms. “The ITA is a unique forum for diverse companies to identify collaborative opportunities to accelerate the mainstream adoption of virtual and augmented reality. Consumer-ready VR and AR will require many interoperating standards, and Khronos looks forward to working with the ITA to help make that vision a reality,” said Neil Trevett, President of the Khronos Group.

KDAB are rewriting the Qt3D module of Qt 5 to provide an easy but flexible API for easily getting 3D content into your Qt applications using either C++ or QML. Qt3D is built on top of OpenGL and OpenGL ES and provides a data-driven renderer configuration. In the previous article we learned about the requirements and high-level architecture of Qt3D 2.0. In order to put some of this into context and to give you a concrete example of how it looks to draw something in Qt3D using the QML API, we will now briefly show the important parts of one of the simple examples that will ship with Qt3D.