Today, The Khronos Group releases the Vulkan Unified Samples Repository, a new central location where anyone can access Khronos-reviewed, high-quality Vulkan code samples in order to make development easier and more streamlined for all abilities. Khronos and its members, in collaboration with external contributors, created the Vulkan Unified Samples Project in response to user demand for more accessible resources and best practices for developing with Vulkan.

Magnum is an Open Source Light­weight and mod­u­lar C++11/C++14 graph­ics mid­dle­ware for games and da­ta vi­su­al­iza­tion. This new release brings Python bindings, Basis Universal texture compression together with glTF support, improved STL interoperability, better Unicode experience for Windows users, single-header libraries, testing improvements, new OpenGL driver workarounds and much more.

We strive to create the most engaging and interactive online experience through our 3D digital ads & E-commerce solutions. Our technology provides memorable brand experiences, drive product consideration, and deliver conversions fare above the industry average.

The Forge Interactive is a think-tank for advanced real-time graphics research for the video game and movie industry. The Forge is a licensed Tools and Middleware Developer for Sony and Microsoft Consoles.

With many techniques to debug SYCL applications that are similar to the way this would be done in any C++ code, there are some things to keep in mind. Codeplay Developer Relations Engineer Georgi Mirazchiyski has posted an outline on how you might go about debugging on your target device. To find out about how to profile your SYCL application, check out the Optimizing Your SYCL Code Using Profiling guide also from Codeplay.

Khronos Associate member Marxent and La-Z-Boy have announced a partnership. La-Z-Boy has already launched several major 3D experiences powered by the Marxent® 3D Cloud, including Augmented Reality, 3D product configuration, and 3D room planning. La-Z-Boy is now expanding the Marxent partnership by making Virtual Reality available to its sales associates and professional designers. “The adoption of multiple 3D applications by La-Z-Boy is further evidence that the age of 3D Commerce in retail is upon us,” said Beck Besecker, Marxent CEO and Co-Founder. Marxent is a participant in the Khronos 3D Commerce Working Group, who’s goal is to align the industry for streamlined 3D content creation, management and display in online retail.

SwiftShader is conformant with Vulkan 1.1 and is becoming quite competent for Vulkan atop CPUs as well. Google developer Nicolas Capens talked about SwiftShader in the context of Vulkan at this month’s X.Org Developer’s Conference in Montreal. Nicolas Capens’ presentation slides are online.

Collabora developer Erik Faye-Lund recently went to XDC 2019, where he gave a talk about Zink (OpenGL on Vulkan) (slides). Erik has written an update on the latest developments around Zink, including upstreaming for OpenGL ES, merging in Vulkan and testing on CI.

Imagination Technologies announces that developers working with TensorFlow will be able to target PowerVR GPUs directly thanks to newly optimised open source SYCL neural network libraries. The SYCL version of TensorFlow supports a very large number of AI operations and is easily user-customizable, meaning that developers using the latest neural networks, or researching their own AI technologies, can run those networks out-of-the-box with high performance on PowerVR. Because TensorFlow SYCL support is both open source and open standards-based, it’s an ideal solution for developers who want to accelerate the latest AI technologies on low-power devices. SYCL builds on the concepts and efficiency of Khronos OpenCL. The PowerVR-optimised SYCL libraries – SYCL-DNN, SYCL-BLAS and Eigen – will be available on GitHub. A TensorFlow fork containing extended SYCL support is available from Codeplay’s GitHub.

​According to TurboSquid, there are three main challenges to overcome if retailers want to fully embrace 3D in the 3D Commerce arena. 1 - We have lots of assets, but we don’t know where they are; 2 - There are so many file formats and 3 - My marketing team doesn’t think in 3D. “Standardizing file formats is going to become even more important as 3D takes hold in retail. We are currently working with companies like Target, Google, and Adobe as part of the Khronos 3D Commerce Initiative to solve this, so companies can “make it once” and use it again and again,” writes Matt Wisdom is co-founder and CEO of TurboSquid. The 3D Commerce working group is open to any company that wishes to participate. Learn more about the 3D Commerce challenges facing retailers, and how your company can join the Khronos Group.

​The Khronos Group has published a maintenance release to OpenGL 4.6 and OpenGL ES 3.2 with bug fixes from GitHub, the old Khronos Bugzilla issue tracker and from internal issues. OpenGL 4.6 changes are in the OpenGL Specification Core with Changes PDF starting on page 736. OpenGL ES 3.2 changes are in the OpenGL ES 3.2 Specification PDF on page 539.

Several neural network frameworks for deep learning exist, all of which offer distance features and functionality. Transferring neural networks between frameworks, however, creates extra time and work for developers. The Khronos Group has developed NNEF (Neural Network Exchange Format), an open, royalty-free standard that allows hardware manufacturers to reliably exchange trained neural networks between training frameworks and inference engines. Learn more about NNEF on the Vision Systems Design blog.

NVIDIA has released the GeForce 440.97 WHQL driver. According to release notes, the driver adds support for windowed G-SYNC for OpenGL and Vulkan-based applications. Additional fixes can be found on the Dark Side of Gaming website.

Today The Khronos Group announces the ratification and public release of the OpenVX™ 1.3 specification, along with code samples and a prototype conformance test suite. OpenVX is a royalty-free open standard for portable, optimized, and power-efficient vision and machine learning inferencing acceleration, vital to embedded and real-time use cases, such as face-, body-, and gesture-tracking, smart video surveillance, advanced driver assistance systems, object and scene reconstruction, augmented reality, visual inspection, robotics, and more. Also available today is an open source implementation of OpenVX 1.3 for Raspberry Pi to make OpenVX widely accessible to developers. The new specification can be found on the OpenVX registry. Read the press release for more details and give Khronos feedback on the OpenVX community forums.

Neil Trevett recently spoke at the 2019 World Conference on VR Industry on October 19 in Nanchang, Jiangxi. The presentation from Neil’s talk are now online.