Recent advances in rendering technology have dramatically improved data visualization, delivering imagery that is highly physically accurate and visual cues that allow users to intuitively understand complex data sets. Particularly, the introduction of real-time ray tracing has gone a long way to advance the technology. However, while these graphical techniques are, indeed, impressive, their application developments are intensely complex and often too expensive. Read more to learn how The Khronos Group’s new Analytic Rendering Exploratory Group seeks to find a solution.

LunarG released new Windows, Linux, and macOS SDKs for Vulkan 1.1.130 that include the most recent extensions and maintenance updates.

Founder and CTO of Third Dimension Technologies (TDT) recently gave a SMPTE webinar for members titled “Streaming Model for Field of Light Displays” (SMFoLD). The webinar focused not on the displays themselves, but the technology needed to stream real-time field of light video with synchronized sound over more-or-less ordinary network connections. TDT is working on this problem along with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in a project managed by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). The title of the project is “Open Standard for Display Agnostic 3D Streaming” (DA3DS). The DA3DS project has taken the approach of transmitting not the images but the OpenGL primitive graphics calls over the network along with the data needed by the OpenGL calls. Learn how the DA3DS project is using OpenGL and how OpenXR plays a part.

NVIDIA has updated their sample framework and have added lots of new Vulkan content. There was a big focus on Raytracing for Vulkan and how to add that to OpenGL. Most samples now support loading glTF 2.0 models.

Khronos President, Neil Trevett, shared his presentation, “Current and Planned Standards for Computer Vision and Machine Learning,” at the Embedded Vision Alliance’s, quarterly Embedded Vision Alliance Industry and Technology Forum on December 12, 2019.

At the start of the year Khronos Group member migenius began introducing glTF 2.0 related features to RealityServer, beginning with support for importing glTF content with their PBR materials. Paul Arden, CEO of migenius has now written about the export half of the glTF equation for RealityServer. migenius plans to continue improving both the import and the export features. Paul invites you to share your ideas on what you’d like to see next.

​The Intel Deep Neural Network Library (DNNL) just announced DNNL v2.0 preview release. New functionality includes SYCL API extensions and interoperability with SYCL code and Support for Intel DPC++ compiler and runtime. Also included are SYCL interoperability examples.

​Google acquired and open-sourced GraphicsFuzz a little over a year ago. GraphicsFuzz is no longer about only OpenGL, OpenGL ES and GLSL shaders but also operates on SPIR-V shaders for consumption by Vulkan drivers. There are also GLSL/SPIR-V shader reducers in addition to the fuzzer that relies upon randomized metamorphic testing.

Unreal Engine v4.24 has been released. Along with a bunch of glTF fixes, the Unreal Engine OpenXR plugin now provides support for the OpenXR 1.0. Learn more about OpenXR and glTF.

At GTC CHINA – taking place December 16-19 at Suzhou Jinji Lake International Conference Center – Henrik Li from NVIDIA, and Ming Dong from Kingsoft, will explain how JX3 Online is using ray tracing for the first time to deliver a top-tier visual experience. In advance of their GTC China talk, NVIDIA talked to Kingsoft Seasun about the project. In connection to Vulkan, NVIDIA asked “JX3 is the first Vulkan game to support ray tracing. Why did your team decide to make this graphical jump?” Kingsoft said they hope to implement cross-platform through Vulkan, and at the same time, they can do ray tracing development on Vulkan. Read the complete transcript from the interview here.

​VMA (Vulkan Memory Allocator) is the GPUOpen single-header, MIT-licensed, C++ library for easily and efficiently managing memory allocation for Vulkan games and applications. One year after the previous release, a new version is being published. You can get it now by going to VulkanMemoryAllocator Releases on GitHub and grabbing the latest v2.3.0.