Imagine & Machine Vision Europe (IMVE) sat down with Khronos President, Neil Trevett and EMVA President, Chris Yates to discuss the new exploratory group for embedded cameras and sensors. They discussed the scope of the new effort, what the groups hope to achieve, the exploratory group process, and why now.

The Vulkan Adreno layer detects optimizations that can be made on Adreno GPUs, offering suggestions on how to improve the usage of Vulkan APIs via logcat messages. Users can configure to disable/enable rules using vkal_config.txt. See readme.txt for more details.

The Exploratory Group is Hosted by EMVA and Khronos to explore the creation of open royalty-free API standards for controlling embedded cameras and sensors. It is open to any camera, sensor, and silicon vendors, together with system integrators and software developers with an interest in sensor processing applications.

Since its announcement in late February, the Exploratory Group membership has already grown to over 40 members, and has received a positive reception from the press:

• EE Times - Looking for APIs That Sit Between Sensors and Vehicle Apps?
  
• New Electronics - Exploratory Group to consider embedded camera and sensor API standards

Exploratory Group meetings start on March 25th and it is not too late to join. There is no cost, and any interested organization is welcome!

More details and instructions for joining the group are here.

Vivid3D C++, is a brand new 3D engine and IDE from Vivid Software.

It is 100% open source, and funded through public means. It has a custom UI called “Resonance2”. It supports scripting through Python, which is unique as most engines use C++ or C#. Click here to be taken to the GitHub page, where you can clone the engine. VIVID3D uploads updates frequently.

The engine uses AssImp 5.0 to allow it to import over 40+ 3D formats, including texture maps.

https://github.com/pysgames/Vivid3D

The GSN Composer is a free online tool for node-based visual programming. It is especially intended for educational purposes, such as computer graphics courses and tutorials.

The built-in shader editor allows rapid prototyping of GLSL shaders. Importantly, the created GLSL code is generic and can be used directly in other OpenGL/GLSL applications. Custom data for the shader’s UNIFORM and IN variables can be easily supplied via the visual interface, which is the main advantage compared to other web-based shader editors.

The shader editor was now upgraded to WebGL2 and supports GLSL ES 3.0 code. WebGL2 allows shaders with multiple render targets (MRT). For each additional OUT variable in the shader code, the interface automatically creates a corresponding output image. This facilitates G-buffers and deferred shading. Furthermore, examples for physical-based rendering (PBR) and HDR environment lighting are provided.

In a previous blog, Naivi discussed porting the NAP framework from OpenGL to Vulkan using the MoltenVK layered implementations and released it as NAP 0.4. In this blog, Naivi discusses how they ported Habitat, a data-driven installation that documents and visualizes natural growth based on 3d scans, to NAP 0.4, and the performance improvements resulting in the move.

Collabora has been working with Microsoft on their D3D12 mapping layer. We’re excited to share that we have recently passed the OpenGL 3.3 conformance tests and have upstreamed the code in Mesa 3D! Also, I’m happy to report that Microsoft has released their compatibility pack that uses our work to provide OpenGL (and OpenCL) support. Photoshop can now run on both Windows on ARM CPUs! This is exciting to see high-profile applications like that benefit from our work!

Microsoft has announced Microsoft Mesh, a connective fabric for mixed reality collaboration. Microsoft Mesh leverages Azure to allow people in different physical locations using different types of devices to join and collaborate in a shared holographic space. Microsoft Mesh is designed to be device and operating system agnostic. And yes, while AltspaceVR is one of the first applications to support Mesh, there will be more cross-platform Microsoft productivity applications and 3rd party applications soon with Mesh in Preview.

Microsoft is one of the biggest supporters of the OpenXR standard, which means that the company wants to help the industry standardize around a certain level of agreed-upon ways of handling common XR functions and APIs and critical inputs like hand tracking and eye-tracking. Adopting OpenXR as Microsoft has helped solve the XR fragmentation problem and benefit Microsoft’s desire to support as many XR devices simultaneously.

Intel is looking to contribute a proper LLVM backend that targets Khronos’ SPIR-V, and is looking for comments/questions/guidance. Read more for Intel’s thoughts on design, implementation, current problems, testing and open questions.

Focused on accelerating the adoption of AR in the enterprise, AREA brings a deep understanding of AR use cases and requirements. Khronos develops open standards, tool chains, and best practices for AR that benefit a wide variety of industries. AREA will actively support Khronos’ consensus-based processes for developing interoperability standards to ease integration of AR-enabling components into powerful products and services. This collaboration offers members of both Khronos and AREA, as well as the enterprise AR community at large, an opportunity to contribute to industry-wide discussions that will positively impact the future of AR-enabled user and customer experiences.

During an AREA-hosted webinar beginning at 11 AM Eastern Wednesday 3rd March 2021, Khronos members will present initiatives on which they are working to reduce barriers to adoption of AR for enterprise and 3D Commerce. To join, please visit: https://www.khronos.org/events/area-webinar-2021.

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) are working with Codeplay Software to enhance the LLVM SYCL GPU compiler capabilities for NVIDIA A100 GPUs. The collaboration is designed to help NERSC and ALCF users, along with the HPC community in general, to produce high-performance applications that are portable across compute architectures from multiple vendors.

LunarG released new Windows, Linux, and macOS SDKs for Vulkan header 1.2.170.0. These SDKs include support for Vulkan Synchronization2 and several other new extensions. The prior SDK supported Vulkan API revision 1.2.162. Read on for information about the new extensions.