The Khronos Group sessions from SIGGRAPH Asia are now available. Watch to hear:

• Khronos President, Neil Trevett, give an Open Standards Update
• glTF’s Ed Mackey shows off next-generation PBR materials for glTF
• Nathaniel Hunter from DreamView discusses 3D Commerce’s Asset Creation Guidelines
• OpenXR Chair, Brent Insko, gives us an informative OpenXR update
• HTC’s, Tony Lin, demonstrates the Vive Cosmos OpenXR developer preview
• WebGL Chair, Ken Russell gives an in-depth update on WebGL
• Vulkan Chair, Tom Olson, updates us on Vulkan’s latest deliverables and future directions
• Followed by Neil Trevett who gives us the latest from the ANARI Working Group’s work on an analytical rendering API for the scientific community

Come and hear the latest from The Khronos Group!

The flight sim community has been a very active and insightful partner in shaping how the Microsoft approached VR, and continues to be a critical partner in Microsoft’s continued development in making further improvements and adding new features to the simulation. Adding VR to Microsoft Flight Simulator was a direct result of community feedback.

Microsoft’s goal was to make this update accessible to as many VR players as possible. To achieve this goal, they worked to make this free update compatible across a wide range of supported devices, including most Windows Mixed Reality headsets (including the HP Reverb G2), Oculus, Valve, and HTC headsets using OpenXR. To access VR, make sure you have downloaded the latest update for Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Remograph, providers of products and services for the computer graphics, visual simulation and 3D modeling markets, announced the release of Remo 3D v2.10. Remo 3D is an effective OpenGL-based tool for creating and modifying 3D models intended for realtime visualization. The primary file format is OpenFlight. Remo 3D is currently available for Microsoft Windows 10/8/7 and Linux. This new version 2.10 of Remo 3D brings support for more keyboard shortcuts, improved macro handling, setting of relative external reference paths and other various fixes. The full list of new features and improvements can be found in the release notes on our website.

Today Khronos released v3.0.6 of the OpenCL Specifications. This is a regular maintenance release with bug fixes and clarifications, an updated address spaces section, new extensions for additional subgroup functions, and an extension for enhanced platform and device version queries. Also, documentation for the C++ for OpenCL V1.0 kernel language is now downloadable from an OpenCL-Docs GitHub repository tag, describing how the language combines C++17 functionality with familiar OpenCL kernel language paradigms. An extension for online compilation of C++ for OpenCL kernels was published earlier this year and offline compilation of C++ for OpenCL kernels has been supported by clang release 9.0 onwards.

Unity’s new OpenXR plug-in enables a broad range of AR/VR devices. It is available as a Preview package for Unity 2020.2. Unity encourages developers to share their feedback.

PoCL is a portable open source (MIT-licensed) implementation of the OpenCL standard (1.2 with some 2.0 features supported). In addition to being an easily portable multi-device (truely heterogeneous) open-source OpenCL implementation, a major goal of this project is improving interoperability of diversity of OpenCL-capable devices by integrating them to a single centrally orchestrated platform. Also one of the key goals longer term is to enhance performance portability of OpenCL programs across device types utilizing runtime and compiler techniques.

Version 1.6 release Highlights: Support for Clang/LLVM 11.0, improved CUDA performance and features, improved PowerPC support and enhanced OpenCL debugging usage.

Khronos announces that LunarG has released the Vulkan Software Development Kit (SDK) version 1.2.162.0, with full support for the new Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions, including Validation Layers and integration of upgraded GLSL, HLSL and SPIR-V shader tool chains. The Khronos open source Vulkan Samples and Vulkan Guide have been upgraded to illustrate ray tracing techniques. Finally, with production drivers shipping from both AMD and NVIDIA, developers are now enabled to easily integrate Vulkan Ray Tracing into their applications.

• Khronos Press Release
  
• LunarG Announcement
• Updated Ray Tracing in Vulkan Blog
  

For the past two years, Holochip has been working on light field technology for the US Navy’s Aegis program. The program calls for a table top light field display that can accommodate horizontal and vertical real-time parallax. In October 2020, the team working on OpenXR™ at Holochip released an open source Vulkan® example projectand started work with light field display technology using the OpenXR API. As a result of both efforts, Holochip has discovered a method of light field real-time rendering that is built upon the Khronos Group’s Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions.

“Most VR games are made with the Unity and Unreal game engines. Unreal added support for OpenXR this year, and Unity plans to do the same by next year. Earlier this week, Facebook added a latency-reducing option called Phase Sync to the Unity & Unreal integrations. That same feature won’t be available to other engines via the Oculus SDK.”

RapidCompact recently interviewed Neil Trevett, President of the Khronos Group and Vice President of Developer Ecosystems at NVIDIA. In the interview, Neil shares his thoughts on the present and future of 3D, discussing the work Khronos is carrying out for the industry, and how 3D content is soon to become pervasive.

Recently, the Khronos 3D Commerce Working Group hosted a webinar to discuss its activities, including why industry alignment on the glTF file format (the “JPEG for 3D”) is crucial, and how standardization will bring new opportunities to any designer, retailer, manufacturer or technology company developing 3D experiences. The panel was led and moderated by Leonard Daly, President of Daly Realism, who was joined by industry experts from Wayfair, UX3D, Amazon Imaging Services, Autodesk, DGG, DreamView, Microsoft and Shopify. At the end of the webinar, the audience submitted questions for the panelists. The answers as a Q&A are now available online.

Lots of exciting glTF news today! Khronos announced three new new Physically Based Rendering extensions for Clear Coat, Transmission and Sheen which continues to build a powerful, interoperable, material model for the glTF ecosystem. As well, new versions of glTF Validator (2.0.0-dev.3.3) and glTF Tools for VSCode (2.3.2) were also published today, adding support for all three of the PBR extensions.

Today, The Khronos Group announces the release of a set of new Physically Based Rendering (PBR) material extensions for glTF. glTF is Khronos’ royalty-free format for widespread, efficient transmission and loading of 3D scenes and models, known in the industry as the ‘JPEG of 3D’. PBR enables developers and artists to achieve photorealism through rendering parameters that correspond to real-world physical properties of materials in 3D assets. These new extensions for Clear Coat (KHR_materials_clearcoat extension), Transmission (KHR_materials_transmission extension) and Sheen (KHR_materials_sheen extension) build on the existing PBR capabilities of glTF 2.0, and together with additional upcoming extensions, are creating a powerful, interoperable, physically-based material model for the glTF ecosystem.

Nsight Systems is a system-wide performance analysis tool, designed to help developers tune and scale software across CPUs and GPUs. This release includes support for the Vulkan Ray Tracing Final Specification.

Max Limper, CEO of RapidCompact, explains how the Khronos Group’s 3D Commerce Working Group is aiming to set standards for content creators to create web optimised 3D models.