Khronos Group Welcomes Ericsson, FueTrek and Mitsubishi as Newest Members; Group Invites Key ISVs to Preview the OpenGL ES Specification; Members Demo OpenGL ES Compliant Products at Game Developer Conference
March 12, 2003 - San Jose - The Khronos Group is pleased to announce that Ericsson Mobile Platforms has joined Khronos as a Promoting Member; and FueTrek Co. Ltd. and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation [TSE: 6503] have joined as Contributing Members. Khronos Members recognize that delivering the rich 3D applications that a host of new mobile devices will increasingly demand—promises significant revenue opportunities. They understand the urgent need for a cross-platform graphics API with advanced 2D and scalable 3D capabilities, and have joined the Khronos Group to participate in the development and deployment of both OpenGL® ES and OpenML™; royalty-free, open standard APIs that enable authoring and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices.
New Members: Ericsson (http://www.ericsson.com/mobileplatforms), a leader in complete 2.5G and 3G platform solutions for mobile phones and wireless information devices; FueTrek (http://www.fuetrek.co.jp/), a developer and licensee of unique IP for mobile phones including 3D graphics, and Mitsubishi Electric (http://global.mitsubishielectric.com), a leader in the manufacture and sales of electrical and electronic equipment; join current Khronos Promoting Members: 3Dlabs, ARM, ATI, Discreet, DVS, Imagination Technologies, Motorola, Nokia, RealVision and SGI; and current Contributing Members 3d4W, Bitboys Oy, Fathammer, HI Corporation, Hybrid Graphics, MediaQ, Seaweed Systems, Superscape, Symbian, Texas Instruments, Tungsten Graphics, Vicarious Visions and Yumetech.
“Ericsson Mobile Platforms is very pleased to join the Khronos Group. We firmly believe that OpenGL ES will become an important graphics API in the embedded arena. Joining the Khronos Group is well in line with our commitment to delivering rich and powerful multimedia functionalities in our mobile platform solutions, and will enable our customers to develop mobile phones and devices with attractive multimedia and gaming applications with appealing user interfaces,” says Björn Ekelund, Vice President Technology Development, Ericsson Mobile Platforms.
Key ISVS Give Feedback: On Wednesday March 5, the Khronos Group hosted the first meeting in a series of sessions with a select group of industry-leading ISVs, including alt.software, Criterion Software Ltd, Ideaworks3d and THQ. The meeting addressed the course that the specification development is taking, and sought feedback from these ISVs that had been given a chance to preview the current draft of the specification under NDA. Khronos invites Developers with significant experience to register for consideration for participation in future meetings of the “ISV Review Team”—for either the OpenGL ES specification, or the OpenML 1.0 SDK – at http://www.khronos.org/developers/review.html
“Encouraging mobile device manufacturers and operators to establish robust and familiar low level rendering models and APIs for 3D is a crucial step for ensuring that emerging mobile platforms become viable commercial targets for publishers and developers,” said Lincoln Wallen, Vice President RenderWare Mobile, Criterion Software Ltd. “If done correctly, OpenGL ES can play an important role in helping to bring 3D games to mobile platforms that the consumer will value.”
Numerous Member Demos: During a Game Developer Session on Thursday March 6, and on the Khronos Booth through out the show; Khronos Members 3D4W, HI Corporation, Mitsubishi Electric, Motorola, Nokia and PowerVR Technologies demonstrated their expertise in wireless and mobile computing by showing hardware device demonstrations that were running on early versions of the OpenGL ES Specification.
“Nokia is here today at this Khronos Group Session, to show animation demos using an OpenGL ES prototype on devices like the Nokia 7650 and Nokia 6650,” said Kari Pulli, Principal Scientist at Nokia and a member of the Khronos OpenGL ES Work Group. “Nokia fully supports the development of the OpenGL ES as a standard, together with a Java MIDP standard JSR-184, for 3D mobile phone graphics.”
“There is a strong need for a standard 3D graphics API to support the increasing number of mobile devices capable of rich, 3D graphics. Much as OpenGL has long been the standard for cross platform graphics and game development, now OpenGL ES is the natural choice to extend that standard to mobile gaming,” said Dave Astle, Executive Producer at GameDev.net. (http://www.gamedev.net/columns/events/gdc2003/view.asp?SectionID=3). “The games we saw here today looked good, and would exceed most people’s expectations of what’s possible on cell phones. As hardware vendors begin to provide OpenGL ES implementations, game developers will be able to more easily develop games for a wide range of devices and reach a very large potential audience.”
How to Get Involved: The Group has a huge amount of momentum both in the development work of the OpenGL ES and OpenML Work Groups, and also in the planned activities to evangelize both of the APIs. Below is information to help get your company involved, or visit www.khronos.org
Membership FAQ http://www.khronos.org/members/index.html
Diagram of How Khronos Works http://www.khronos.org/members/how_it_works.html
Khronos Membership Benefits http://www.khronos.org/members/benefits.html
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