At The Polys - WebXR Awards, Patrick Cozzi received the Lifetime Achievement Award for his work on glTF and its use to enable an open and interoperable 3D ecosystem.

glTF is a 3D asset format developed by the Khronos Group that is widely adopted, including for use in 3D Commerce web and native applications. The 3D Commerce Working Group at Khronos brings together industry-leading e-commerce companies to remove the barriers to deploying 3D in e-commerce at industrial scale. Today, the Working Group has released the open source glTF Asset Auditor Tool for content creators throughout the 3D Commerce supply chain to use as part of their asset validation pipelines. By enabling rigorous asset QA to be consistently applied across companies, the amount of 3D model reworking can be greatly reduced while increasing compatibility and ease of use for downstream clients.

Although the glTF Asset Auditor has been initially created to address the needs of 3D Commerce, it works with any glTF file and can benefit any industry that needs to reliably deploy and use 3D assets at a pervasive scale. Read the blog to learn more.

In this educational paper from TU Wien, they conclude that supporting a Vulkan route was much less bumpy for their students than they initially anticipated, and therefore propose a pragmatic route for transitioning to Vulkan in academia for the purpose of teaching real-time computer graphics. Teaching Vulkan from the start will have a positive effect on students for becoming proficient users of modern graphics APIs and, thereby, in more advanced courses when they encounter Vulkan again. Using a low-level API enables students to learn about the massively parallel operation mode of modern GPUs early in their visual computing education. TU Wien’s evaluation has shown that students appreciate the skills and knowledge they picked up through using the Vulkan API. Teaching Vulkan is both viable and beneficial to students who aim to become competent practitioners of visual computing. While the transition may be challenging, it appears to be a worthwhile investment to provide students with future-proof education.

The XR Hands package, which is currently in preview, enables hand tracking by utilising both the default XR subsystem that Unity provides as well as OpenXR. This indicates that it can be used in conjunction with other standard systems such as the XR Interaction Toolkit. Quest and HoloLens are currently supported by XR Hands, and Unity has plans to add support for additional OpenXR headsets that include hand tracking.

AMD has released a new version of it’s AMDVLK Vulkan driver. The update brings support for VK_EXT_physical_device_drm extension for querying Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) properties for physical devices, enabling users to match Vulkan physical devices with DRM nodes on Linux. The update also fixes a couple of potential CTS failures.

Developed by Mobileye, the open-source OpenCL Tensor & Tiling Library provides easy-to-use, portable, modular functionality to tile multi-dimensional tensors for optimized performance across diverse heterogeneous architectures. Tiling is particularly critical to devices with limited local memory that can partition data for asynchronously pipelining overlapped data import/export and processing.

Go to the OpenCL-TTL GitHub repository

Nsight Graphics 2022.7 is available now, adding support for the finalized release of Vulkan Video decode. You can frame capture applications that use Vulkan Video to inspect events and resource allocation.

Get started today

“We are extremely pleased to be fully compliant with the OpenXR [1.0] [for Android] standard as it will give PICO consumer and enterprise users access to a wider array of apps to improve their overall experience with our suite of consumer and enterprise headsets. This is an important step for PICO as we continue to enhance our headsets and the apps our PICO users are able to access through them.” - Henry Zhou, President of PICO.

GROMACS, a popular molecular dynamics software, released v2023 with improved support for SYCL for Intel Arc, AMD Radeon, and NVIDIA. The SYCL improvements has more GPU offloading features, RDNA support for AMD, SYCL optimizations for HPC platforms, and direct GPU to GPU communication.

LunarG, developers of the Vulkan SDK, are asking Vulkan developers to complete a survey to better understand what’s working well and what needs improvement in the Vulkan API ecosystem. This survey is a cooperative effort between LunarG and the Khronos Vulkan Working Group. The survey closes on Monday, February 27th, 2023.

Vulkan was designed with compute support as a mandatory feature. In this blog, Sascha Willems shows how to get started with Vulkan compute acceleration.

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts Neil Trevett as they discuss Neil’s career, the evolution of computer graphics, and his role at NVIDIA, where his work focuses on helping developers make good use of GPUs. He also explains the benefits of standardization in industry and how open standards can enable innovation and interoperability. Neil also discusses how 3D is changing the landscape of e-commerce and online shopping and gives his perspective on the Metaverse and how it can leverage other disruptive technologies.

Today, Khronos released the OpenCL 3.0.13 maintenance update to improve specification clarity and usability. The specification and documentation can be downloaded from the OpenCL Registry. This release includes upgrades to the OpenCL SDK, including improved pkg-config support for the OpenCL headers and ICD loader. The OpenCL ICD loader also includes a utility to query which OpenCL loader layers are enabled, and upstreams build support for FreeBSD and Windows using MinGW.

AEC Magazine reviews AMD’s new professional graphics driver that can deliver a significant 3D performance boost in DS Solidworks and other OpenGL-based applications. Benefiting not only the current AMD Radeon Pro W6000 series, but also AMD’s older generation pro graphics cards as well.

Over the course of the last decade, Rust has emerged as a new programming language for writing safe low-level code. In the first of a series, Faith Ekstrand explores using Rust to write Mesa Vulkan drivers