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The Khronos Group today announces the formation of an Exploratory Group to investigate the creation of standards and guidelines for the production and distribution of real-time 3D representations of products, so they can be experienced realistically and consistently across all platforms and devices, such as mobile, Web and Augmented Reality (AR) or Virtual Reality (VR) solutions. To gather industry input, the Exploratory Group is open to any company without cost or IP licensing obligations. If there is industry support, Khronos will form a Working Group to enable any interested company to join Khronos and participate under its proven multi-company governance process.

The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, announces the ratification and public release of the OpenXR™ 0.90 provisional specification. OpenXR is a unifying, royalty-free, open standard that provides high-performance access to augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR)— collectively known as XR—platforms and devices. The new specification can be found on the Khronos website and is released in provisional form to enable developers and implementers to provide feedback at the OpenXR forum.

The Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, today announces the creation of the Vulkan Safety Critical Working Group, to enable safety critical industries to take advantage of advancements in GPU graphics and compute acceleration, and display control, at the highest levels of safety integrity.

The Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, today announces a request for industry feedback to gauge interest in developing a new low-level, heterogeneous communications open standard that could transform the way applications are developed for High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC) systems. If there is industry support, then Khronos would create a working group and invite any interested company to participate for a voice and a vote in creating and evolving a multi-vendor standard under Khronos’ proven multi-company governance process. Those interested in finding out more and providing feedback are invited to visit the Khronos Heterogeneous Communication feedback page.

Khronos has formed a liaison agreement with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) in the interest of jointly advancing open geospatial standards related to AR and VR, distributed simulation, and 3D content services. The liaison will let Khronos and OGC assess standards in these fields as well as identify future potential standards that will facilitate interoperability and hardware capabilities of relevant data sharing and analysis. The collaboration will occur through working groups, forums, workshops, committee activities, etc., and OGC will adopt Khronos standards where appropriate.

The Khronos Group announces updates to key standards and opens the Khronos Education Forum at SIGGRAPH. With various Khronos events throughout the week, including a day of Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions and its annual networking reception, Khronos is accelerating open standards ecosystems and continuing its commitment to the SIGGRAPH community of interactive graphics professionals. At SIGGRAPH, Khronos will be talking about the following standards developments and initiatives: NNEF 1.0 Specification Finalized, OpenXR Demonstrates Specification in Hardware Implementation, Ecosystem Grows; New Extensions Released and a Call for Participation - Education Forum Opens for Public Contribution. In addition to standards updates, The Khronos Group is hosting educational sessions and networking events this week, including a full-day of BOF sessions with talks from various members.

The Khronos Group announces the ratification and the public release of the NNEF 1.0 (Neural Network Exchange Format) specification. After gathering feedback from the industry review of the provisional specification, Khronos releases NNEF 1.0 as a stable, flexible, and extensible open standard for hardware manufacturers to reliably deploy optimized, accelerated neural network inferencing onto diverse edge devices. Together with this release, an ecosystem of tools is now also available on GitHub, including an NNEF parser and converters from Tensorflow and Caffe. Importers into popular inferencing environments, including Android’s Neural Network API (NNAPI) and Khronos’ OpenVX, are also being developed.

The Khronos Group announces the availability of the SYCL Adopters Program for the C++-based programming framework for parallel programming. Under the Adopters Program, implementers of SYCL 1.2.1 can access an extensive conformance test suite, and then upload their test results to Khronos for review and the opportunity to become officially conformant. Together with the SYCL Adopters Program, Khronos also announces the release of a maintenance update for SYCL 1.2.1, delivering specification clarifications that enable enhanced run-time optimizations.

The Khronos™ Group is working with Au-Zone Technologies to enable NNEF™ (Neural Network Exchange Format) files to be easily used with leading machine learning training frameworks. NNEF enables the optimized ingestion of trained neural networks into hardware inference engines on a diverse range of devices and platforms. Au-Zone is working with the Khronos NNEF Working Group to implement two purpose-built bidirectional converters, between TensorFlow and NNEF and also Caffe2 and NNEF. Both converters are expected to be released as open source projects to the development community in Q3 2018 under the Apache 2.0 license.

The Khronos Group announces the release of the Vulkan 1.1 and SPIR-V 1.3 specifications. Version 1.1 expands Vulkan’s core functionality with developer-requested features, such as subgroup operations, while integrating a wide range of proven extensions from Vulkan 1.0. Khronos will also release full Vulkan 1.1 conformance tests into open source and AMD, Arm, Imagination, Intel Corporation, NVIDIA and Qualcomm have implemented conformant Vulkan 1.1 drivers. Find more information on the Vulkan 1.1 specification and associated tests and tools at Khronos’s Vulkan Resource Page.

The Khronos Group announces that the Vulkan Working Group’s Portability Initiative has been working with Khronos members Valve, LunarG, and The Brenwill Workshop to enable Vulkan applications to be ported to Apple platforms. The Vulkan Portability resource page links to a collection of free and open source set of tools, SDKs, and runtime libraries to enable Vulkan development on macOS and deployment on macOS and iOS platforms. Valve is extending Dota 2 using the Vulkan tools on macOS to achieve significantly higher performance than native OpenGL drivers. Vulkan support for Dota 2 on macOS will be released in the coming months as a free update.

The Khronos™ Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, announces the release of a geometry compression extension to glTF™ 2.0 using Google Draco technology to significantly reduce the size of glTF models and scenes. The Khronos glTF Draco extension specification is accompanied by optimized, open source compression and decompression libraries on the Draco GitHub site to enable the rapid deployment of glTF compressed geometry into tools, engines, applications, and browsers everywhere.

The Khronos™ Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, announces the launch of the OpenGL® 4.6 Adopters Program to enable implementations to become officially conformant to the latest generation OpenGL specification. The significantly enhanced OpenGL 4.6 Conformance Test Suite used in the Adopters Program has been released in open source on GitHub to enable industry participation in testing and ongoing conformance test suite improvements. General information on Khronos Adopters Programs can be found here.

The Khronos Group is holding an outreach event in Taipei to update the Taiwanese embedded industry on the latest developments in open standards for parallel computation, vision acceleration and neural network processing. The event will be held at the Taipei Shangri-La Far Eastern Plaza Hotel on Friday January 19th, admission is free.