Today, The Khronos® Group, an open consortium creating graphics and compute interoperability standards, and the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA), the leading European industry association dedicated to vision technology, jointly announce the formation of an Embedded Camera API Exploratory Group, open to all at no cost, to explore industry interest in the creation of open royalty-free API standards for controlling embedded cameras and sensors. All participants will be able to discuss use cases and requirements for new interoperability standards to accelerate market growth and reduce development costs in embedded markets using vision and sensor processing and associated acceleration. If the Exploratory Group reaches significant consensus then Khronos and EMVA will work to initiate the proposed standardization projects at the appropriate organizations.

The Khronos Group announces the ratification and public release of the SYCL 2020 final specification—the open standard for single source C++ parallel programming. A major milestone encompassing years of specification development, SYCL 2020 builds on the functionality of SYCL 1.2.1 to provide improved programmability, smaller code size and increased performance. Based on C++17, SYCL 2020 enables easier acceleration of standard C++ applications and drives a closer alignment with the ISO C++ roadmap.

Today, The Khronos Group 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.

Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announces the release of a set of new Physically Based Rendering (PBR) material extensions for glTF. glTF is Khronos’ royalty-free format for widespread, efficient transmission and loading of 3D scenes and models, known in the industry as the ‘JPEG of 3D’. PBR enables developers and artists to achieve photorealism through rendering parameters that correspond to real-world physical properties of materials in 3D assets. These new extensions for Clear Coat, Transmission and Sheen build on the existing PBR capabilities of glTF 2.0, and together with additional upcoming extensions, are creating a powerful, interoperable, physically-based material model for the glTF ecosystem.

Beaverton, OR – July 28, 2020 – Today, The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating graphics and compute interoperability standards, announces multiple conformant implementations of OpenXR™ are shipping from Oculus and Microsoft, leveraging the newly opened OpenXR 1.0 Adopters Program and open source conformance tests. OpenXR is a royalty-free, open standard that provides direct access into Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)—collectively known as XR—runtimes across diverse platforms and devices. The OpenXR Adopter’s Program enables consistent cross-vendor testing and reliable operation of OpenXR across multiple platforms and devices with OpenXR-conformant products published on the Khronos Conformant Product Registry.

The Khronos Group announces the ratification and public release of the SYCL 2020 Provisional Specification. SYCL is a standard C++ based heterogeneous parallel programming framework for accelerating High Performance Computing (HPC), machine learning, embedded computing, and compute-intensive desktop applications on a wide range of processor architectures, including CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and AI processors.The SYCL 2020 Provisional Specification is publicly available today to enable feedback from developers and implementers before the eventual specification finalization and release of the SYCL 2020 Adopters Program, which will enable implementers to be officially conformant—tentatively expected by the end of the year.

The Khronos® Group publicly releases the OpenVG™ 1.1 Lite Provisional Specification for advanced 2D vector and raster graphics, with conformance tests placed into open source under the Apache 2.0 license. OpenVG 1.1 Lite enables this high-quality 2D vector graphics API to be fully accelerated by any OpenGL® ES 2.0-compatible GPU for the first time, significantly increasing the range of devices on which it can be deployed. The Provisional Specification is released in markdown format on GitHub to enable the developer community to provide input and feedback before the specification and conformance tests are finalized.

Today, The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, publicly releases the OpenCL™ 3.0 Provisional Specifications. OpenCL 3.0 realigns the OpenCL roadmap to enable developer-requested functionality to be broadly deployed by hardware vendors, and it significantly increases deployment flexibility by empowering conformant OpenCL implementations to focus on functionality relevant to their target markets. OpenCL 3.0 also integrates subgroup functionality into the core specification, ships with a new OpenCL C 3.0 language specification, uses a new unified specification format, and introduces extensions for asynchronous data copies to enable a new class of embedded processors. The provisional OpenCL 3.0 specifications enable the developer community to provide feedback on GitHub before the specifications and conformance tests are finalized.

Today, The Khronos Group announces the ratification and public release of the Vulkan Ray Tracing provisional extensions, creating the industry’s first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for ray tracing acceleration. Primarily focused on meeting desktop market demand for both real-time and offline rendering, the release of Vulkan Ray Tracing as provisional extensions enables the developer community to provide feedback before the specifications are finalized. Comments and feedback will be collected through the Vulkan GitHub Issues Tracker and Khronos Developer Slack. Developers are also encouraged to share comments with their preferred hardware vendors. The specifications are available today on the Vulkan Registry.

Today, The Khronos Group announces that its Analytic Rendering Exploratory Group has received strong industry support and is transitioning to a full Working Group to create an analytic rendering interface API for data visualization. This new API will be called ‘ANARI’. Any interested company is invited to join Khronos and participate in the ANARI™ Working Group under the consortium’s multi-company governance process to have a voice and a vote in the creation of this open, royalty-free standard. This initiative is expected to be of particular interest to any company creating scientific visualization rendering engines, libraries and applications.

Today, The Khronos Group and the Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum, education and research complex, with 19 museums and the National Zoological Park, announce their Collaborative Agreement for the increase and diffusion of knowledge using 3D scanned models from the Smithsonian collections. Working with Khronos, the Smithsonian publicly launched their Open Access initiative today, which included the release of approximately 2.8 million 2D images and 3D models into the public domain with the internationally recognized Creative Commons Zero (CCO) license. Additionally, a variety of platforms will be launched to make its collection media, collections data, and research data available for educational and research endeavors, creative reuse, computational analysis and innovative explorations.

The Khronos Group announces the release of the Vulkan 1.2 specification for GPU acceleration. This release integrates 23 proven extensions into the core Vulkan API, bringing significant developer-requested access to new hardware functionality, improved application performance, and enhanced API usability. Multiple GPU vendors have certified conformant implementations, and significant open source tooling is expected during January 2020.

Today The Khronos Group, announces the ratification and public release of the OpenVX™ 1.3 specification, along with code samples and a prototype conformance test suite. OpenVX is a royalty-free open standard for portable, optimized, and power-efficient vision and machine learning inferencing acceleration, vital to embedded and real-time use cases, such as face-, body-, and gesture-tracking, smart video surveillance, advanced driver assistance systems, object and scene reconstruction, augmented reality, visual inspection, robotics, and more. Also available today is an open source implementation of OpenVX 1.3 for Raspberry Pi to make OpenVX widely accessible to developers. The new specification can be found on the OpenVX registry.

Today The Khronos Group announces a significant expansion in the ecosystem for the NNEF™ (Neural Network Exchange Format) open, royalty-free standard that enables hardware manufacturers to reliably exchange trained neural networks between training frameworks and inference engines. New and improved NNEF open source convertors, including for TensorFlow Lite and ONNX, enables NNEF to be used to carry trained frameworks from a wider range of training frameworks. A set of extensions to the NNEF 1.0 specification enable NNEF files to contain a richer network of operations and topologies. Finally, an openly available NNEF Model Zoo enables inferencing engines to test their reliable import of NNEF models. More information on NNEF can be found at the NNEF Home Page.

The Khronos Group announces the ratification and public releaseof the OpenXR™ 1.0 specification together with publicly available implementations and substantial ecosystem momentum. OpenXR is a unifying, royalty-free, open standard that provides high-performance, cross-platform access to virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR)— collectively known as XR—platforms and devices.