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.
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.
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.
RapidCompact has a three part blog looking at the benefits of e-commerce and the importance of an efficient delivery format. In this part, RapidCompact looks at streamlined 3D workflows and addresses the challenges represented by variety of interfaces, manual workload, and lack of consistency. RapidCompact, an active member in Khronos’ 3D Commerce WG, addresses these needs through active collaboration in the industry to align the ecosystem, enable sustainable innovation, and ease consistency through standardization.
Khronos Group member Varjo today announced the launch of its next generation human-eye resolution XR/VR headsets – the XR-3 and VR-3. Varjo aims to be compatible with OpenXR 1.0 in early 2021, as well as offering compatibility with Unity, Unreal Engine and hundreds of industrial 3D engines and applications.
This presentation walks through a real-world example of taking an application from DirectX 12 to Vulkan ray tracing - including missteps, obstacles and insights encountered along the way. It also covers recommendations for tooling setup and techniques to get your ray tracing journey smoothly underway.
The Khronos Group would like to Welcome Sidequest as an Associate member. At SideQuest we believe that XR deserves an open future to be able to properly flourish, and we at SideQuest are delighted to be able to support that future. OpenXR is the working group we are particularly interested and we plan on showing our support by helping our partners, developers and users to see the benefits that OpenXR provides.
Raspberry Pi has announced that their V3DV Vulkan Mesa driver for Raspberry Pi 4 has demonstrated Vulkan 1.0 conformance. The conformance process is a way to ensure that Khronos standards are consistently implemented by multiple vendors, so as to create a reliable platform for application developers.
