At SIGGRAPH 2023, Khronos hosted a series of packed-house Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) sessions exploring the latest updates and future developments for glTF, the open-standard 3D format that allows content creators to build an asset once and use it everywhere. Standing-room-only gatherings of content creators, platform providers and tool vendors discussed new glTF capabilities spanning materials, complex scenes and interactivity, physics, real-time asset delivery for metaverse applications, and skeletal-facial anchoring for virtual try-on and its widespread and key use in e-commerce.

Dylan Cavers created a project to educate others on how to write more robust, bug-free SYCL code, something that is not always obvious how to do when first learning a new API. In this blog, Dylan gives us their motivation behind the project, negative SYCL tests that showcase bad SYCL code, synchronization mistakes, differences in implementation-defined behavior, feature misuse, and implicit behavior not written explicitly but happens as a side-effect.

The Khronos Group announced that it will bring the Vulkanised developer conference to Mountain View, CA, USA on February 5-7, 2024. Vulkanised is the largest event dedicated to developers using the Vulkan® API and is a unique technical event that brings the Vulkan community together to exchange ideas, solve problems, and help steer the future development of the Vulkan API and ecosystem.

Khronos has issued a public call for talks and is seeking submissions from application developers, Vulkan implementers, engine and framework builders, thought leaders, researchers, educators, and open-source tool providers who are eager to share their experiences for the benefit of the Vulkan community. Vulkanised provides a great opportunity for Vulkan experts to share their work, ideas, and unique perspectives with peers in the Vulkan ecosystem. The deadline for submissions is Friday, November 24, 2023. Anyone is invited to submit a proposal at: https://vulkan.org/events/vulkanised-2024/call-for-submissions.

Unleashing Creativity in 3D Models with glTF and PBR - Join us for this webinar presented by Eric Chadwick to exploring the artistic frontier of using The Khronos Group glTF 3D assets. The webinar takes place at 9am PST on Tuesday, September 19, 2023. The artistic creation of realistic materials in real-time 3D models in glTF using physically-based rendering (PBR) is discussed and demonstrated. Attendees will gain valuable insights into the best practices, workflows, and optimizations required to simulate iridescent, anisotropy, and other effects and to achieve stunning visual realism for 3D assets. Eric will discuss the techniques used and available tools to achieve them, with plenty of time for Q&A. For additional info and to register visit:

The Khronos Group is developing a website to teach developers about OpenXR, the cross-platform API for AR and VR. The OpenXR Working Group is asking for volunteers to test the tutorial prior to launch. This is an exclusive preview of the website made available only to test volunteers. OpenXR is looking for developers of all ages and backgrounds who have an interest in native XR (AR & VR) programming. If you would like to volunteer, please complete the webform accessible via link below.

Mark Young of LunarG created a “how to” guide for GFXReconstruct for Vulkan developers. The guide shows several examples of how to use the GFXReconstruct tools. These examples will help work through issues you may discover while attempting to perform the same process on your own application.

The PoCL open-source OpenCL implementation from Tampere University now has a new PoCL-Remote backend that enables transparent offloading of OpenCL tasks across nodes on a network, enabling distributing computing without using MPI or similar APIs. Since PoCL-Remote uses standard OpenCL API calls, acceleration offload can be performed identically whether using local or remote devices, for seamless selective/adaptive edge offloading and other use cases.

Khronos Group has released KTX v2.0 specification update. KTX is an efficient, lightweight container format for reliably distributing GPU textures to diverse platforms and applications. KTX files hold all the parameters needed for efficient texture loading into 3D APIs such as OpenGL, glTF, and Vulkan, including access to individual mipmap levels.

Changes introduced in KTX 2.0.2 include:

• Provide detailed instructions for how to register supercompression schemes and metadata
• Adjust D24_UNORM_S8_UINT description
• Fix description of block ordering in ETC1S slices and clarify that decoder has no knowledge of image orientation
• Clarify level data layout for BasisLz/ETC1S
• Fix list of data that comprises a mip level
• Fix missing max(1, …) in num_blocks_x calculation
• Clarify that KTXwriterScParams can be used for ASTC and other block-compression scheme encoding parameters
• Add VK_KHR_maintenance5 formats to GL formats mapping