Taskcan Technologies is a New Zealand based pool of 3D professionals from the film VFX industry, producing solutions mostly within WebGL. Taskcan develops industrious pipelines for 3D web and e-commerce.

SiliconArts has become a full member of the Khronos Group standards consortium to support the development and ratification of ray tracing extensions to the Vulkan cross-platform 3D API. The company will extend its RayCore GPU cores to be compliant with the upcoming Vulkan ray tracing extensions, providing the necessary functionality to accelerate new Vulkan API calls. When integrated with existing raster shader GPUs, the resulting solution off-loads the ray tracing calls while preserving the existing raster graphics pipeline, to enhance real-time photo-realistic graphics quality on a wide range of devices.

GO2FUTURE focuses on the development of software technologies for commercial interactions in 3D environments with VR devices, powered by iCloud Gaming.

LIV is on a mission to empower VR live streamers to connect with their audiences in novel and meaningful ways. Their content creators have driven over 1 billion views since launching in March 2018, and they are growing rapidly.

​The Khronos Group has uploaded a few new presentations and webinars over the past couple of weeks:

• AREA - Introduction to OpenXR - Webinar
  
• GTI workshop - Online
  
• Anari Outreach - Webinar
  

You can always find the latest presentations, webinars and videos online and a list of upcoming events on the Khronos website.

Things are quickly improving for 3D on the web, with WebXR gaining support in more browsers and <model-viewer> achieving API stability. <model-viewer> is an open source web component that brings glTF™-based interactive, accessible 3D content to your website with a single line of HTML, including AR placement on both Android and iOS. New with v1.1 of <model-viewer> is a scene-graph API that allows basic access to the glTF model source, enabling simple edits to be made to 3D assets with just a few lines of JavaScript. Learn how to edit glTF assets in your browser with model-viewer.

TensorFlow team announces the official launch of OpenCL-based mobile GPU inference engine for Android, which offers up to ~2x speedup over existing OpenGL backend, on reasonably sized neural networks that have enough workload for the GPU.

The Khronos Vulkan Working Group has decided to rename the default branch for the Vulkan-Docs repository from ‘master’ to ‘main’. This is expected to occur over the weekend of August 29-30, 2020, assuming no unanticipated issues come up. A GitHub issue has been created with additional information. Downstream consumers of Vulkan-Docs, starting with the first specification update after August 30, 2020, you should pull from ‘main’ branch to get the current repository contents. Please refer to this GitHub issue for all further updates.

Arm is delighted to announce astcenc 2.0! The ‘astcenc’ ASTC compression tool was first developed by Arm while ASTC was progressing through the Khronos standardization process seven years ago. astcenc has become widely used as the de facto reference encoder for ASTC, as it leverages all format features, including the full set of available block sizes and color profiles, to deliver high-quality encoded textures that are possible when effectively using ASTC’s flexible capabilities. This is a major update which provides multiple significant improvements for middleware and content creators. Learn move about astcenc 2.0 in the Khronos blog ‘Create ASTC textures faster with the new astcenc 2.0 open source compression tool’ written by our guest, Peter Harris, from Arm.

Atypical Games, with support from Samsung, took on the task of implementing Vulkan support into their engine. In this blog, Razvan Baraitaru, Atypical Games, will share his experiences with porting to Vulkan and then later Calum Shields, Samsung, will discuss some of the issues that cropped up in the Android implementation of “Sky Gamblers: Infinite Jets”. There are numerous reasons for choosing Vulkan. Primarily it creates an opportunity for better performance and compatibility across many of our target platforms - Android, Nintendo Switch and Windows. Also, we had in mind some possible future Stadia games where Vulkan is the only graphics API.

id Software, part of the ZeniMax Media Inc. family of companies, has provided technical, design and artistic leadership as a world-renowned game developer and technology innovator since its founding in 1991. id Software’s iconic brands such as Wolfenstein®, DOOM®, QUAKE® and RAGE® have become staples of popular culture for generations of gamers.

​The Khronos Group invites you to join them on August 19th for a live webinar. Learn about the new Analytic Rendering Interface API which will streamline data visualization development for any company creating scientific visualization rendering engines, libraries and applications. Join us for an overview of ANARI from Peter Messmer, ANARI Working Group Chair, ANARI and Applications from John Stone, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Jefferson Amstutz, Intel for an Overview of ANARI Implementation efforts. Registration is free and now open. We hope to see you there.

Darmstadt Graphics Group (DGG) is pleased to announce the launch of their in-browser automated 3D optimization solution - RapidCompact 4.0 - in time for SIGGRAPH 2020. RapidCompact automates the creation of high-quality optimized 3D assets for web, mobile, and AR or XR platforms. It takes large, complex 3D assets and turns them into compact content which can be viewed on any device. DGG is one of 80 leading retail, hardware, and software companies participating in the 3D Commerce Working Group.

Los Alamos National Laboratory is a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security. Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.

The LibreOffice Project announces the availability of LibreOffice 7.0, a new major release providing significant new features: support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.3; Skia graphics engine and Vulkan GPU-based acceleration for better performance; and carefully improved compatibility with DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files. Read on for the complete announcement.