This week, Neil Trevett spoke at the 2019 Open AR Cloud Symposium. Neil’s presentation focused on OpenXR and glTF covering how these Open Standards fit into the rest of the Khronos Ecosystem. Presentation slides and video are available online.

The latest update of the AMDVLK Open Source Vulkan driver sees several notable additions. The driver now officially supports VK_EXT_host_query_reset, VK_EXT_separate_stencil_usage, and VK_KHR_uniform_buffer_standard_layout extensions and updates the Vulkan API headers against version 1.1.108. Read more about this update at Phoronix or download the driver on GitHub.

Shrenik Sadalgi, Director of Next Gen Experiences, Wayfair recently spoke with Marketing Technology Insights about the Khronos 3D Exploratory Group. 3D-driven immersive experiences are gaining momentum, and to scale these experiences across platforms and channels, we need standards and guidelines so 3D content be exchanged effectively and experienced consistently across platforms. The most promising effort so far has been by the Khronos Group glTF working group who aim to create the JPEG for 3D. The 3D Commerce Exploratory Group will explore the creation of standards and guidelines for the production and distribution of real-time 3D representations of products across a variety of endpoints. Through the realization of this group we’re making the initiative more inclusive, global, and hoping to accelerate standardization efforts. Shrenik has a lot more to say on the subject, be sure to read his interview online.

Earlier today, Google and Binomial announced that they have partnered to open source a sophisticated texture compressor and a high-performance transcoder for Binomial’s cross-platform Basis Universal texture format. This format can help solve a long-standing problem in the 3D ecosystem: how can 3D textures assets be efficiently packaged or transmitted for an application in a way that is both compact AND can be efficiently processed by the wide diversity of GPU hardware texture engines - each of which has a preferred native format?

Tony Parisi has posted a nice write up on how and why the Khronos 3D Commerce Exploratory group is important today. If you’re a retailer, supplier, tech provider, content creator or anyone who services clients in these roles, we’d urge you to start preparing for this near future today. Join the Khronos exploratory group. We’re looking for people and companies to contribute to the effort. Read the post.

Intel has released their 26.20.100.6861 graphics drivers. OpenGL has been bumped to 4.6, which adds an extension to use Vulkan’s SPIR-V shaders in OpenGL. Vulkan has been given four new extensions: VK_EXT_depth_clip_enable, VK_EXT_host_query_reset, VK_EXT_scalar_block_layout, and VK_KHR_shader_float16_int8. The OpenCL kernel compile times have been reduced.

Max Limper has written a guest post on the Zeiss blog about 3D data optimization for VR, AR and the Web. He also discusses #glTF and the 3D Commerce Exploratory Group. Zeiss and DGG are contributing to the The Khronos Group 3D Commerce Exploratory Group. Max was awarded with the Hugo-Geiger-Prize of the Fraunhofer society, in recognition of his dissertation entitled “Automatic Optimization of 3D Mesh Data for Real-Time Online Presentation”. Regarding the topics of efficient binary encoding and realistic PBR materials, Max also contributed to the current glTF 2.0 standard. During August 2018, Max became a co-founder of DGG (Darmstadt Graphics Group GmbH), a Khronos member.

Imagination Technologies announced that it has joined SiFive’s DesignShare ecosystem, giving system designers easy access to its industry-leading PowerVR GPU and neural network accelerator (NNA) IP cores. The PowerVR GPU will be the first fully featured GPU supporting the Vulkan applications programming interface (API) available via the DesignShare ecosystem. Mohit Gupta, vice president, SoC IP solutions, strategy and business development, SiFive; said: “We’re delighted to welcome Imagination into the DesignShare movement. Imagination is renowned for its industry-leading GPU IP and award-winning NNA IP. PowerVR’s support of APIs such as Vulkan, OpenCL, Android NNAPI, and SYCL will deliver new opportunities for customer growth for the ecosystem. Together, we hope to inspire customers to challenge the norm and develop groundbreaking custom silicon. We’re excited to see the creativity that our collaboration inspires.”

Esri CityEngine 2019.0 was just released. CityEngine now supports glTF and GLB (binary glTF) for both import and export. Note that also the PBR material attributes of glTF 2.0 can be read, edited and written. You can find the complete release notes on the ArcGIS website here.

The recently formed Khronos OpenCL Tooling Subgroup has been focused on developing and enhancing open source tools and components, targeted at embedded systems and heterogeneous computation applications; the new tools and resources are available to the entire OpenCL ecosystem.

The Khronos Group would like to welcome Academic Member Hungarian Academy of Sciences Institute for Computer Science and Control. The fundamental task of the Institute is to perform basic and application-oriented research in an interdisciplinary setting in the fields of computer science, engineering, information technology, intelligent systems, process control, wide-area networking and multimedia. The mission of MTA SZTAKI includes the transfer of up-to-date research results and state-of-the-art technology to university students. The Shared Virtual Reality Group within the Institute has been dealing with immersive and multi-user virtual reality since 2009 and has accomplished four large scale EU virtual reality projects until now. The Group published its own open-source virtual reality library called ApertusVR in 2016 which perfectly fits the scope of OpenXR.

NexTech AR Solutions announced that it joined an exploratory group of leading retailers, manufacturers, and technology companies in a groundbreaking collaboration to establish 3D commerce standards and guidelines. The exploratory group was formed by Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading companies creating advanced 3D standards, at the end of April.

Michael Wong, VP of Research and Development, Charles Macfarlane, VP of Marketing and Rod Burns, Developer Relations Manager are attending this year’s AutoSens Conference in Detroit from 14th to 16th May, 2019. Michael Wong will be presenting “Ensuring safe AI in a car” highlighting the practical engineering challenges of turning deep learning, classical machine vision and sensor fusion algorithms from research prototypes into real-world automotive-grade systems. Codeplay will be exhibiting the benefits of open standards OpenCL and SYCL on Renesas R-Car V3H platform for rapid development and deployment of ADAS and AV functions.

Reboot Develop Blue’s inaugural technical track was a huge success! Thank you to the Khronos members and developer community for all of your help! We had an excellent line-up of talks and we look forward to the follow-up 3-day event, Reboot Develop Red, in Banff, Canada starting October 30th 2019. We will host another set of excellent talks on Khronos Standards. We will launch a new AR/VR track to cater to the specific design and technical considerations of the XR industry, and more. We hope to see you there! Presentations from the event can be found here. Videos coming soon!

Diligent Engine is a modern cross-platform low-level graphics library and rendering framework. In a recent update, Diligent Engine enabled support of GLTF 2.0 format. It also implemented physically-based renderer with image-based lighting and released cross-platform GLTF viewer as example application.