QEMU, a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer, is participating in Outreachy 2017 May-August. Vulkan-ize virgl is included in their list of proposed projects—“This project would aim at implementing Vulkan accelerated rendering.” Visit the event page for more information.

Socionext has developed the “SC1810” series, the fourth generation version of its high-performance graphics display controllers. In addition to further strengthening the graphics functions for in-vehicle display system, Socionext incorporated the world’s first hardware accelerator that conforms with Khronos Group’s computer vision API OpenVX to the SC1810. Khronos Group maintains public pages for products and companies that pass conformance tests.

Come to Moscow and visit the second International Blend4Web Conference on May 6! Blend4Web is a tool for creating 3D Web applications using Blender and WebGL/HTML5. We would love to have you attend and for those who are interested to present your company and projects. Read more and register online.

NVIDIA has released the new VRWorks SDK for application and headset developers along with the GeForce driver version 378.78. This release includes added samples demonstrating the following new functionality under Vulkan. Vulkan extensions for VR SLI, Single Pass Stereo and Lens Matched Shading are currently released in experimental form and should not be used in production code. Complete details at NVIDIA GameWorks.

Google I/O 2017 will be here before you know it. 2017’s I/O is going to be at Mountain View’s Shoreline Amphitheatre like it was in 2016. This year VR will be a hot topic. Daydream is just beginning, and Khronos’ OpenXR is here to help developers create tools and gear that will work across all platforms.

During GDC 2017, Khronos Group unveiled OpenXR as the name for their VR/AR API standard that’s currently being developed. UploadVR got the chance to speak with Khronos Group president Neil Trevett to get some questions answered. When asked if there were any specific entities missing that Khronos Group would welcome, Trevett immediately mentioned one of the biggest faces of AR: Microsoft. He noted the company’s input now would be around the emerging Windows Mixed Reality platform, which UploadVR recently did a hands-on with, but they’d obviously be able to bring AR expertise to that 2nd round of the API’s development as well.

The Khronos Developer Day Session videos from GDC 2017 are now on YouTube. The videos include “Reach the Largest Gaming Platform of All: The Web. WebGL, WebVR and glTF”, “Refocusing on VR Innovation: Can Standards Simplify Cross-Platform Virtual Reality Development?”, “Vulkan Game Development on Mobile”, “Vulkan on Desktop Deep Dive”, “When Vulkan was One: Looking Back, Looking Ahead.”

GAPID is a collection of tools that allows you to inspect, tweak and replay calls from an application to a graphics driver. GAPID is still in development but already can be used to debug many Android OpenGL ES and Vulkan applications.

At Linaro Connect 17 this past week in Budapest, Vulkan was talked about at the ARM’s Mali graphics drivers session, as well as the lack of current open-source drivers due to lack of customer demand.

Tobii had some VR demos that they were showing on the GDC Expo Hall floor as well as within Valve’s booth. They were primarily focusing on the new user interaction paradigms that are made available by using eye gazing to select specific objects, direct action, but also locomotion determined by eye gaze. There are a lot of open questions around the intimate data that will be available to application developers and the privacy and consent protocols that will inform users and provide them with some level of transparency and control. It’s an important topic being looked at by the OpenXR standardization process. Listen to the Voices of VR Podcast with Johan Hellqvist, VP products and integrations at Tobii.

ARM blog post on Mali Graphics Debugger (MGD) integration in Unity. Covering MGD support for Unity applications developed with OpenGL ES and Vulkan.

Xilinx, Inc announced expansion into a wide range of vision guided machine learning applications with the Xilinx reVISION stack. Developers with limited hardware expertise can use a C/C++/OpenCL development flow with industry-standard frameworks and libraries like Caffe and OpenCV to develop embedded vision applications on a single Zynq SoC or MPSoC. For application level development, Xilinx supports industry-standard frameworks including Caffe for machine learning and OpenVX for computer vision.

Last week was GDC, and a ton of new tech, as well as new VR games and apps were announced and broadcast out to millions. But one of the most important stories out of GDC was also one of the least flashy. It was a gathering held by a nonprofit known as The Khronos Group, and it dealt directly with how much new VR hardware and software is being released, and how it is rapidly becoming more and more difficult for developers to keep up. Say Hello to OpenXR.

Khronos Chapters are very busy this month with a total of six meetups around the world. Meetups are taking place this March in Milano, Oslo, Cluj Romania, London, Prague and Boston. Check out the details of each meetup and join one for an educational and fun look at Khronos Technology. No Chapter near you? Find out how you can start your own Chapter.

Phoronix had a call with The Khronos Group president Neil Trevett to discuss some of their latest initiatives and the ongoing advancements to the Vulkan API, WebGL, SPIR-V, and more. Read about some of the highlights.