vertexshaderart.com is a site where you provide a WebGL vertex shader who’s only inputs are a number that counts 0, 1, 2, 3, ... and time (and audio). Your job is to make a vertex shader that makes something cool.

glTF is now supported in Assimp, BabylonJS and xeoEngine. You can also find some great new models contributed by @mlimper_cg and @OkinoComputer. And of course, December 25th wouldn’t be complete without NORAD and the Cesium Santa tracker. NVIDIA also has a great write-up on how GPUs help NORAD Track Santa as he navigates the globe.

Avtech Scientific has joined OpenHPC, a collaborative effort to provide a new, open source stack supporting the world’s most sophisticated high-performance computing (HPC) environments. It will integrate its open source OpenCL-based multiphysics toolkit - [Advanced Simulation Library](http://asl.org.il) into the framework.

We have some good news and some bad news. The year-end target release date for Vulkan will not be met. However, we are in the home stretch and the release of Vulkan 1.0 is near!



A more detailed update is available on the Vulkan ecosystem page.

Tobias Hector from ImgTec has uploaded all of the recent Vulkan video presentations.

A-Frame is an open source framework for easily creating WebVR experiences with HTML. It is designed and maintained by MozVR (Mozilla’s virtual reality team research team). A-Frame wraps WebGL in HTML custom elements, enabling web developers to create 3D VR scenes that leverage WebGL’s power, without having to learn its complex low-level API. Because WebGL is ubiquitous in modern browsers on desktop and mobile, A-Frame experiences work across desktop, iPhone (Android support coming soon), and Oculus Rift headsets.

AMD has announce it will start rolling out in January an open source set of tools called GPUOpen. The “All Open” stack will contain open source modules for two parallel stacks, each containing modules for OpenGL graphics, motion video codecs, and OpenCL GPU computation. The “Professional/Gamer” stack will include the open source motion-video module and a closed source OpenGL module. Its final OpenCL module will support both OpenCL and Vulkan. Linux will gain access to a full open source, high-performance driver stack, with the only constraint being that developers must use Vulkan instead of the older OpenGL.

If you’re a Star Wars fan and have a computer and a smart phone, give this Chrome Experiment a try. From Engadget, “Lightsaber Escape is a Chrome Experiment that Google made in conjunction with Lucasfilm and Star Wars visual-effects studio Industrial Light & Magic. It uses WebGL for the 3D graphics, plus WebRTC and WebSocket for the real-time communication between your phone and desktop.”

Neil Trevett, President of the Khronos Group recently spoke at the 2015 Q4 Q4 2015 Embedded Vision Alliance Member Meeting on December 9, 2015 in San Jose. This is the slide presentation from that talk.

With Unity 5.3, Unity3D is dropping the “Preview” label and making WebGL an officially supported build target. The Premium and Enterprise support plans will now cover support tickets for the WebGL platform.

Most flows use EGL to facilitate the sharing of objects between multiple client APIs, requiring the Khronos extension CL_KHR_EGL_IMAGE. The examples in this PowerVR Imaging Framework installment from Imagination Technologies show the different zero-copy flows supported.

The International Workshop on OpenCL (IWOCL) has posted their December 7th 2015 news roundup. Be sure to take a look at this extensive list, and update IWOCL if anything is missing.

Imagination Technologies introduces another installment in their Vulkan series. In this post Tobias will be doing some analysis of why and how Vulkan is an explicit API, and what exactly that means. There is a lot of mention of Vulkan being a low-level API, and in some ways that’s true, but a lot of work is still abstracted from developers to handle cross-vendor compatibility.

It’s been a very busy few weeks for the Khronos Group chapters. We’ve added three new chapters: Paris France, Washington DC and Wroclaw Poland. There is a good selection of upcoming meetups as well:


- Computer Graphics on the Web: Dec 8, 2015 - Melbourne, Australia

- First Khronos Wroclaw meetup + VR: Dec 9, 2015 - Wroclaw, Poland

- Image Processing with WebGL: Dec 10, 2015 - London, Britain

- WebGL Developers Meetup: Dec 17, 2015 - Milano, Italy

- OpenGL for beginners part 1: Jan 06th, 2016 - Naritaweg, Amsterdam


Errata: We originally said Seattle Washington… our mistake, our latest chapter is in Washington DC.

For nearly two decades, Flash Professional has been the standard for producing rich animations on the web. Since the emergence of HTML5 and demand for animations that leverage web standards, Adobe rewrote the tool to incorporate native HTML5 Canvas and WebGL support.