Ethereal Engine believes that the Metaverse must be built on the web and in the open. After looking at what was out there, they found that nothing existing was up to the challenge. Ethereal Engine was born and they hope that you will come help build this better future. Ethereal Engine is open source and CPAL licensed. They donate their time and resources to continuing to improve the engine, but Ethereal Engine needs a community to make sure the future of the immersive web serves the people building it.

The Vulkan Working Group has released the VK_EXT_host_image_copy extension, allowing copies to and from images to be done on the host rather than the device.

Vulkan already provides functions to copy between buffers and images through vkCmdCopyBufferToImage, vkCmdCopyImageToBuffer, and vkCmdCopyImage (later made extensible in VK_KHR_copy_commands2 and Vulkan 1.3). These functions are essential as the physical layout of an image (otherwise known as memory swizzling) created with VK_IMAGE_TILING_OPTIMAL is opaque to the application, so it cannot meaningfully copy to and from such an image by mapping its device memory on the host. What’s more, its device memory may not be host-mappable to begin with. However, the Vulkan implementation is capable of copying to and from these types of images with hardware-accelerated swizzling.

These functions work well when the image data is available or needed in device memory and it is desirable to do the copy on the device timeline. There are, however, common scenarios where that is not true. Additionally, whenever the data is available or needed in host memory, a buffer↔image copy can incur penalties. The recently released VK_EXT_host_image_copy extension aims to address these inefficiencies.

Conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 drivers are now available for M1- and M2-family GPUs. The open source graphics drivers have passed the conformance test suite designed to verify every feature in the specification. For Asahi Linux users, these open source drivers are now available.

Imaging & Machine Vision Europe sat down with Laurent Pinchart, Founder of Ideas on Board, to discuss Khronos’ efforts in embedded vision and specifically Kamaros. The Kamaros Working Group was founded in March 2022 to focus on the development of an open, cross-vendor standard for camera, sensor, and ISP control.

KDGpu is a thin wrapper around Vulkan whose purpose it is to make modern graphics APIs more accessible and easier to learn. It cuts through the verbose syntax, makes managing object lifetimes much simpler and allows you to get your project working without having to be bogged down in intricacies involved in tasks such as synchronization or memory handling. The sensible option defaults in KDGpu mean that you can focus on solving the problem at hand. Furthermore, KDGpu exposes almost all of the power of raw Vulkan and is very well suited to teaching modern graphics APIs and their concepts.

NVIDIA Omniverse spatial computing update adds support for Khronos Group’s OpenXR open standard, enabling Omniverse to run on VR headsets, AR headsets, and XR glasses from manufacturers such as HTC, Magic Leap, and Varjo.

The new release also expands the OpenUSD ecosystem with new integrations and connections to Omniverse. For example, Adobe Firefly generative AI models will soon be available as APIs in Omniverse to improve design workflows.

The glTF open standard 3D asset format from the Khronos Group enables online retailers and adtech platforms to enhance their interactive customer experiences with runtime-efficient, 3D product models. With the latest glTF PBR (Physically Based Rendering) material extensions, artists can create incredibly detailed and realistic assets – but in many cases, they’ve been held back by concerns about how these assets would perform on the web due to large texture sizes. Today, Khronos is releasing the open source glTF-Compressor tool for interactively optimizing and fine tuning texture compression settings, to help users adjust their 3D assets for optimal web delivery.

Almalence OpenXR layer computationally corrects optical performance deficiencies in VR head-mounted displays by using a higher-resolution display panel and sharper optics with a larger eye box. Thanks to the versatility of OpenXR, Almalence’s Digital Lens technology can seamlessly enhance picture quality in every compatible VR application without requiring any additional code or complex integration. The integration process is as simple as having the user install the OpenXR Layer, and the magic of Digital Lens starts working behind the scenes, elevating the visual quality of the content in a way that was previously unimaginable.

Join us Wednesday, August 9th, for a full day of Khronos BOFs at SIGGRAPH! The BOFs will take place at the JW Marriott LA Live, Platinum Salon D beginning at 10am PT. At the end of the BOFs we will have a joint networking reception with the Metaverse Standards Forum starting at 6pm. RSVP to enjoy a cold beverage with us!

Thank you to our networking reception sponsors: Cesium, LunarG, and Epic Games!

Not able to join us SIGGRAPH in-person? We’ve got you covered:

Livestream Schedule

Ace Hardware, the largest retailer-owned hardware cooperative in the world, partnered with Epigraph, a software company specializing in augmented reality (AR), 3D configurators, and other interactive content for product marketing, to build out a full WebAR visualization solution for all carried brands and applicable products for acehardware.com.

This case study details the role played by the Khronos Group’s glTF open standard for 3D visualization in helping Epigraph meet those challenges and deliver Ace customers a WebAR shopping experience that has transformed the way the hardware giant does business.

NVK, a new fully open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware, has landed in the main Mesa branch and will be included as an experimental driver in the 23.3 release of Mesa. Read more for a Q&A from its authors.

The Khronos Group’s 3D Format Working Group has released the first set of training videos to help developers and artists learn what glTF is and description of glTF extensions such as transmission, clearcoat, and volume. Click Read More to see the first set of videos in the glTF Tutorial Series YouTube playlist.

3D Formats Working Group Chair, Daniel Frith explores technological approaches to make 3D content creation easy and accessible for anyone. Using AI, it is possible to create a 3D camera that will significantly contribute to democratizing 3D content creation. Through Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)-based methods, his company, Avataar, has discovered that they can lay the foundation for high-quality 3D assets using only 2D input images.

NeRF-based 3D asset creation is already helping retailers scale 3D asset creation for e-commerce. At the same time, organizations like The Khronos Group and the Metaverse Standards Forum are actively working to make sure it’s possible to move those assets freely across platforms and hardware. Soon, average consumers may be able to use the same tools they use to make TikTok videos to create and share 3D objects. This will mark a true tipping point for the metaverse: a time when billions of people can not only experience the metaverse but also actively build it.

The Khronos Group announces that the ANARI 1.0 open standard, cross-platform 3D rendering engine API, has been finalized and that multiple implementations are shipping from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA, together with an open-source software development kit (SDK) from Khronos. ANARI significantly simplifies the development of applications in domains such as scientific visualization by providing high-level functionality to build an in-memory scene representation to be rendered without the need for low-level graphics code and enabling the use of any 3D rendering engine that supports the ANARI API. The ANARI 1.0 specification has been openly developed and incorporates significant community feedback, including compatibility with glTF Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) materials. ANARI has already been widely integrated into scientific visualization applications and is expected to be used by diverse applications needing portable access to multiple rendering engines delivering sophisticated 3D functionality such as ray tracing and global illumination.

Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA, together with the Joint Development Foundation (JDF), an affiliate of the Linux Foundation, today announced the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) to promote the standardization, development, evolution, and growth of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description technology.

The alliance seeks to standardize the 3D ecosystem by advancing the capabilities of Open Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD). By promoting greater interoperability of 3D tools and data, the alliance will enable developers and content creators to describe, compose, and simulate large-scale 3D projects and build an ever-widening range of 3D-enabled products and services.

“The Khronos Group warmly welcomes AOUSD to the community of open standard organizations. We look forward to a close cooperation so that Khronos standards, including glTF, can support and synergize with AOUSD’s mission for the good of the industry.” - Neil Trevett, President of The Khronos Group and VP of Developer Ecosystems at NVIDIA