The Khronos Group would like to welcome Contributor Member Wayfair. Through cutting-edge innovation, Wayfair makes it possible for shoppers to quickly and easily find exactly what they want across a massive selection of home furnishings, décor, home improvement, housewares and more. With technology like 3D modeling, extended reality experiences, machine learning and more, Wayfair is reinventing the way people shop for their homes - from product discovery to final delivery.

The Khronos Group BOF day is today, July 31. For those folks that really wanted to catch some of the BOF Day sessions, but couldn’t make, we have it covered for you. Starting at 9AM PT, the morning livestream will start on YouTube. The afternoon sessions will be on a second afternoon livestream also on YouTube. Learn more about the Khronos Group BOF Day and all of the various sessions on our SIGGRAPH 2019 event page.

The Khronos Group announces the ratification and public release of the OpenXR 1.0 specification together with publicly available implementations and substantial ecosystem momentum. OpenXR is a unifying, royalty-free, open standard that provides high-performance, cross-platform access to virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR)— collectively known as XR—platforms and devices. The new specification can be found on the Khronos website and via GitHub. To learn more about the OpenXR 1.0 Specification and other Khronos activity at SIGGRAPH, read the Press Release.

The Khronos Group announces new 3D Commerce Working Group and key updates to flagship standards WebGL, glTF, and Vulkan. In the spirit of continued commitment to the SIGGRAPH community of interactive graphics professionals, Khronos delivers a number of developments and initiatives, including:

• 3D Commerce Initiative Becomes Khronos Working Group; Call for Participation Announced
  
• WebGL Releases High-Impact Extensions and Ecosystem Developments
  
• glTF Universal Texture Extension Drafting Underway Using Binomial’s Basis Universal Texture Technology; First Prototype Support Appears in Engines
  
• glTF Tools Ecosystem Expands, Including Universal Texture Tools and glTF Import/Export in Blender 2.80
  
• New Vulkan Extensions Ship; Vulkan Sees Increased Usage by CAD and Professional Authoring Tools
  

Read the Press Release to learn more.

SIGGRAPH is next week! The conference is July 28-August 1. For those going, Khronos will be hosting several Birds of a Feather sessions. For all those folks that will not be present, we will be offering live streaming of all our sessions (glTF, WebGL, OpenXR and Vulkan) on the Khronos Group YouTube Channel, and will follow up with recorded video the following week. For complete details on all the sessions, please ask your friends and co-workers to take a look at our SIGGRAPH event page! A special thanks to our Title sponsor NVIDIA, Beer Sponsor LunarG, and Demo sponsor Cesium, for making possible the Khronos Networking Reception at the end of the day.

The Khronos Group is excited to officially kick off their first 3D Commerce Birds of a Feather (BOF), where they will discuss their efforts to align the retail industry’s 3D assets and specifications to optimize workflows and minimize distribution costs in the retail sector. The BOF will provide insight into the goals and directions of the 3D Commerce group so that interested parties can judge if they want to get involved. Join and help Khronos lead a disruptive change in terms of product digitalization and pushing e-commerce to the next level!

Cauldron is a framework for rapid prototyping that will be used in AMD SDK samples and effects. It supports Direct3D 12 and Vulkan. Check out the features and screenshots on the Cauldron’s project page. Lots of additional details on the GPUOpen blog and a glTF based sample is available as well.

Big news! 3D software developer, Autodesk has joined The Khronos Group. Autodesk is an industry-leading provider of 3D design, engineering and entertainment software, that joined the 3D Formats Working Group to support the Khronos glTF file format and the 3D Commerce Exploratory Group, a group of companies exploring standards and guidelines for the production and distribution of real-time 3D representations of products.

Microsoft has released OpenXR for Windows Mixed Reality app on the Microsoft Store. Windows Mixed reality users will now be able to run OpenXR-based applications just by installing the app from the Store. OpenXR lets you write code once that’s then portable across a wide range of hardware platforms — write once and run anywhere!

The Khronos Group would like to welcome Associate Member Crank Software. Storyboard is Crank Software’s embedded UI solution that enables the rapid development of graphically rich, responsive touch screens for embedded platforms. Easy to use with quick 3D animations and brilliant effects, Storyboard lets you create UIs that exceed a customer’s smartphone experience, even on resource-constrained devices. Major household brands like Coca-Cola, John Deere and GE Appliances rely on Crank to get their award-winning embedded devices to market faster, and with a higher performance than ever before.

The Khronos Group is deeply saddened to learn of the fire and loss of life at Kyoto Animation Studio. We send our deepest condolences to the families, friends and community.

​DGG has launched a case study on 3D workflow automation in E-Commerce. The DGG workflow centres around glTF. Are a business that is active in E-Commerce, and interested in using real-time 3D graphics technology, such as AR, VR or 3D on the Web, on a massive amount of 3D datasets? Read the full call for participation on the DGG website.

The Khronos Group would like to welcome Contributor Member Argonne National Laboratory. Argonne National Laboratory is a multidisciplinary research center with a pioneering history in high-performance computing. The Laboratory-wide computational science ‘ecosystem’ integrates more than 350 scientists and engineers, working in interdisciplinary project teams with embedded applied mathematicians and computer scientists. Argonne’s computational science capability comprises and leverages the hardware and expertise within the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, the Joint Laboratory for System Evaluation, and the Laboratory Computing Resource Center.

Adobe Dimension 2.3 was release which includes new ways to create and share, including glTF/GLB export. New features include a new align & distribute tool; Ability to export 3D models; Support for embedding 3D scenes on the web (Beta). See the complete list of new features in the latest updated.

Cesium launched a new Blender add-on that makes it easier to publish and stream 3D models on the web via Cesium ion. The add-on uses the official Khronos glTF Blender exporter to convert the model to glTF before uploading to ion for tiling.