Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group will be chairing a discussion group at Operational Safe Systems for Level 5 Automation (OSS5) on February 28th in San Francisco. Discussions will explore if existing open standards a reasonable starting point for safety critical APIs. The newly formed Vulkan SC Working Group makes a compelling starting point for safety certifiable access to GPU acceleration for graphics and compute.

At its MWC keynote in Barcelona today, Microsoft promised to keep the HoloLens ecosystem open. “We believe in an open API surface area and driver model. We will continue to participate in guiding open standards like OpenXR so anyone can innovate with our headset from the sensors that are being used to the differentiated experiences that are being created,” Microsoft’s HoloLens chief Alex Kipman said today. HoloLens 2 supports an open API surface and driver model—and Microsoft continues to support open standards such as Khronos and OpenXR. Learn more about OpenXR and the companies behind it.

To jointly advance accessibility of 3D geospatial content, The Khronos Group recently formalized a liaison with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). One of the first victories of this collaboration between the computer graphics and geospatial communities is a new OGC Community Standard addressing massive scale 3D pioneered by longtime Khronos contributors, the Cesium team. Learn more about the Liaison and new Standard in the Khronos blog post.

DXVK, the Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 10/11 which allows running 3D applications on Linux using Wine, has reached v1.0. This version includes a number of new features and fixes. A detailed overview of the changes is written up at Gaming On Linux as well as a list of improvements and bug fixes can be found on the GitHub tagged release.

LunarG has released a white paper for Vulkan GPU-Assisted Validation. GPU-Assisted Validation involves using the GPU to check for API usage errors at shader execution time. This new white paper explains the concept of GPU-assisted validation and how a developer can use it. Read the paper here.

The Khronos Group today announces the creation of the Vulkan Safety Critical Working Group, to enable safety critical industries to take advantage of advancements in GPU graphics and compute acceleration, and display control, at the highest levels of safety integrity. Safety critical graphics are a key component for industries such as automotive, avionics, medical and energy. As display requirements become more advanced, safety critical graphics APIs must evolve to meet the industries’ needs. Now, automotive and other industries are seeking advanced GPU graphics, compute and display functionality that can be deployed in safety critical systems. In response to this industry demand, this new Khronos Working Group will create open, royalty-free API standards based on the existing Vulkan API specification to enable safety critical industries to utilize advanced graphics and compute acceleration. To best suit these market’s needs, the new API will aim to be compatible with industry standards for safety critical software, such as RTCA DO-178C Level A / EASA ED-12C Level A (avionics); FACE (Future Airborne Capability Environment) (avionics); and ISO 26262 ASIL D (automotive).

The Khronos Group recently announced a request for industry feedback to gauge interest in developing a new low-level, heterogeneous communications open standard that could transform the way applications are developed for High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC) systems. If there is industry support, then Khronos would create a working group and invite any interested company to participate for a voice and a vote in creating and evolving a multi-vendor standard under Khronos’ proven multi-company governance process. Khronos encourages you to fill out the online survey to provide us your feedback, or email hetcommsfeedback@khronos.org if you would like to discuss getting involved.

Online Feedback Survey

Khronos has released OpenCL 2.2-10. This maintenance release fixes multiple community reported issues, brings all KHR OpenCL extensions neatly into the Extensions spec, and adds support for the SPV_KHR_no_integer_wrap_extension. You will find the OpenCL 2.2-10 version of the specification in the Khronos Group OpenCL Registry.

The Khronos Group would like to welcome its newest Associate Member NSITEXE. In NSITEXE’s semiconductor IP, we realize a balance between performance and power that realizes compatibilities, and also support the quality aspects that meet automotive standard. We will supply a processor and development environment that you can use generically, from various industrial applications to smart home appliances.

WebGL 2.0 has emerged into a powerful technology built on the back of a very successful WebGL 1.0, and is now fully utilized across numerous professional CAD and 3D apps on the Web. Learn about WebGL 2.0’s dynamic history and how it became the most widely used web graphics API on the market.

Be sure to check out the first Boston meetup of the year hosted by Jim Susinno. One of my favorite applications for accelerated graphics is video games. I’ve been working on some simple games lately using OpenGL directly without any engines or frameworks - and it’s fun! Let’s discuss our game-making techniques and how to keep things as fast as possible - minimizing state changes and per-frame uploads, packing bits into channels, re-using data… playing to the strengths of the silicon as enabled by OpenGL. Pizza will be provided.

Khronos member Au-Zone Technologies has written a guest post on the CNX Embedded Software blog showing how to add Machine Learning (ML) processing to an embedded product with the help from the Khronos Groups Neural Network Exchange Format (NNEF). The post illustrates, with an example implementation, how to detect and classify different pasta types on a moving conveyor belt.

The Khronos Group would like to welcome Contributor Member HP Inc. HP Inc. creates technology that makes life better for everyone, everywhere. Through our product and service portfolio of personal systems, printers and 3D printing solutions, we engineer experiences that amaze. HP’s virtual reality technology is founded upon our rich history of product innovation and deeply rooted customer relationships which enables us to deliver the most immersive technologies that help businesses lead their industries.

The MIT-licensed C++11 graphics/game engine Magnum has a new version, packing WebGL-enabled and HiDPI-aware ImGui integration, tweakable constants for live coding, improved Vulkan interoperability and compilation time optimizations.

Cadence Design Systems and ArcSoft announced they have partnered to develop AI and vision applications for Cadence Tensilica Vision DSPs. ArcSoft has collaborated with Cadence to port beauty shot, high dynamic range (HDR), bokeh and facial unlock applications to the Vision P6 DSP. The software environment includes complete, optimized support for more than 1,500 OpenCV-based vision and OpenVX 1.1 library functions.