Celebrating a successful first year, the Vulkan API is gaining tremendous momentum in high-fidelity gaming. Vulkan support appears in leading game engines such as Unity and Unreal, numerous game studios actively developing Vulkan titles, and a dozen Vulkan titles shipping including Doom, Quake, The Talos Principle and Dota 2. Vulkan drivers are also shipping from all of the major GPU manufacturers for desktop and mobile systems. Today, Khronos has released new Vulkan extensions for cross-platform access to Virtual Reality and multi-GPU functionality. Find out more about growing Vulkan momentum and the updates and extensions released at GDC here.

The Khronos Virtual Reality Initiative announced in December is making rapid progress in designing an open standard for portable Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality apps and devices. Today, Khronos releases the official name of the standard: OpenXR. The group is made up of a who’s-who of VR industry leaders working together to combat industry fragmentation in these markets. Any interested companies are invited to join Khronos to get involved and help steer the VR industry. Read more on the Khronos Blog and Press Release.

Khronos has today announced a call for participation in a new Exploratory Group to create a native 3D Portability API to enable developers to write rendering code that can run efficiently on Vulkan, DX12 and Metal-based systems. This API could also be a solid foundation for the next generation WebGL that can bind to this portable API for use with JavaScript and WebAssembly. Interested companies are welcome to join Khronos for a voice and a vote in this initiative. Find out how to get involved on the 3D Portability homepage.

Already supported by production browsers from Google and Mozilla, the WebGL 2.0 standard is final and now ready for developers to create the next wave of 3D web applications and engines. WebGL 2.0 exposes OpenGL ES 3.0-class functionality, bringing desktop-OpenGL capabilities to web developers everywhere. Additionally, Khronos has now started work on the next generation of WebGL to bring the power of the new generation of explicit 3D APIs to the Web. More information on WebGL 2.0 is available in the Khronos Blog.

Khronos has released a developer preview version of glTF 2.0 that brings significant enhancements to the open standard for runtime 3D asset delivery. For example, glTF 2.0 introduces physically-based rendering (PBR) for portable, high-quality materials - making glTF independent of the underlying 3D API. Khronos is seeking input and feedback from the industry via GitHub to help finalize glTF 2.0 in the next few weeks. Khronos has also today released a request for quotations on a funded project to bring glTF 2.0 export capability to the open-source Blender 3D Authoring Tool. Find out how to share feedback and get more details.

Mali Graphics Debugger (MGD) library loading has been integrated into Unity so developers can quickly and easily use MGD to profile OpenGL ES applications. MGD also supports debugging of graphics applications developed with Vulkan.

NVIDIA announced the immediate availability of the NVIDIA GDC Vulkan developer driver which supports not only extensions that Khronos just released, but also a set of Vulkan extensions that provide the multi-projection functionality of our Maxwell and Pascal GPU architectures, which is the foundation for technology such as VRWorks, fast voxelization, and single pass cubemap rendering.

Join the Khronos Group at GDC, where the latest in game development and delivery technology is all anybody will be talking about. This year we will be at the Moscone, starting with a VRDC table on Monday and Tuesday, Developer Day Sessions all day Tuesday and demos at our GDC Booth #2419. The week will wrap up on Thursday with a Khronos sponsored WebGL/WebVR/glTF Meetup offsite. As well, there are going to be several Khronos related sessions this year. Checkout all the details online. Stop in at our booth to say high and pick up your free t-shirt. Not at GDC, order your Vulkan/WebGL/glTF shirt today.

Facebook-owned Oculus’ head of content Jason Rubin says “We support an open standard… We want everybody in the PC business to join an open standard that’s a platform where everybody gets to say what’s important to them.” Rubin is referencing Oculus’ work with the Khronos Group on developing a common set of industry-wide VR standards. Read more about the work Oculus is doing in VR today.

This project is an OpenCL-based simulator for brain models built using Nengo. It can be orders of magnitude faster than the reference simulator in nengo for large models. Nengo is a Python library for creating and simulating large-scale brain models.

Qualcomm is preparing to launch a head-mounted display accelerator program which will give companies building VR headset access to part of Qualcomm’s supply chain partners alongside efforts related to product marketing. Qualcomm has also announced that they will be updating their development kit to highlight development focusing on the 835. The new dev kit will feature free motion 6DOF inside-out tracking based on a pair of cameras, and will also highlight new eye-tracking technologies that will lessen compute loads on the system. Qualcomm is one of the growing list of companies contributing to the Khronos Group Virtual Reality Standard Initiative.

Igalia has contributed several features and bugfixes that helped achieve this important milestone. During the last several months, Igalia has been working hard on improving the Intel driver to enable 64-bit floating point support. We developed OpenGL extensions such as ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 and ARB_vertex_attrib_64bit, which were a major contributor to increasing the supported OpenGL version. As members of the Khronos Group, Igalia also had the opportunity to contribute tests and bugfixes to the conformance suite itself.

The 51th tutorial from ogldev is now available. This tutorial demonstrates how to clear the color buffer in Vulkan.

Don’t miss theIntroduction to the Vulkan Loader webinar on Tuesday March 23rd at 8am PDT. The Vulkan loader plays a critical role in your Vulkan application by loading the drivers and layers available on your system. This webinar will provide a deep dive into the design and behavior of the loader’s interfaces between applications, layers, and drivers. The main presentation is followed by a Q&A session.

Xeolabs developer Lindsay Kay this month extended xeogl to load glTF models with PBR materials, for both metallic/roughness and specular/glossiness work flows, using the FRAUNHOFER_materials_pbr extension. This is still a work in progress, as they are following along behind the current development of the glTF 2.0 spec. xeogl is a WebGL-based 3D engine that’s geared towards visualization applications in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).