Open, royalty-free, cross-platform API enables hardware acceleration for vector graphics libraries such as SVG and Flash – an industry first
1st August, 2005 – SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles, California – The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that it has ratified and publicly released the OpenVG™ 1.0 royalty-free, open standard for low-level 2D vector graphics. OpenVG enables hardware acceleration of libraries such as such as Flash and SVG, enabling high-quality, anti-aliased, scalable 2D vector graphics on embedded and handheld devices with highly interactive performance and low levels of power consumption. Developed by Khronos members including 3Dlabs, ATI, Bitboys, BitFlash, DMP, Ericsson, Falanx, Hybrid Graphics, Ikivo, Imagination Technologies, Nokia, NVIDIA, Motorola, PalmSource, Symbian and Sun Microsystems; the OpenVG standard has been designed to seamlessly interoperate with OpenGL® ES 3D graphics; - creating a high-performance, fully integrated 2D and 3D embedded graphics acceleration environment. The OpenVG API specification is available for free download at http://www.khronos.org/openvg/http://www.khronos.org/openvg/spec.html.
Handheld devices have an urgent need for the smooth and fluidly scalable 2D that high-quality vector graphics can provide to create high-quality user interfaces, new-generation mapping and GPS displays, compelling 2D games and ultra-readable text on small displays. SVG Tiny, SVG Basic and Flash Mobile are designed for mobile devices, and OpenVG accelerates these by defining a low-level hardware acceleration layer that will enable graphics silicon to provide great performance for these packages at very low power-levels. OpenVG 1.0 was defined in only twelve months using the established Khronos Working Group process, and Khronos expects to update the OpenVG specification annually in order to track and enable the rapid developments of graphics capabilities in handheld and embedded devices.
“The OpenVG Working Group has created a solid specification with broad industry support from scratch in just twelve months; again – showing the efficiency and effectiveness of the Khronos specification process,” said Koichi Mori, chairman of OpenVG working group, and senior research engineer at Nokia. “OpenVG 1.0 will fills an immediate real need in the embedded graphics market: a – widespread, inexpensive hardware-accelerated 2D vector graphics that will can catalyze the development and deployment of ubiquitous high-quality 2D applications and interfaces.”
“Future mobile phone user interfaces will primarily use vector graphics. Bitboys has been providing mobile vector graphics hardware since 2002 – the introduction of the OpenVG API allows us to provide a standard interface for all our graphics processors,” said Petri Nordlund, CTO of Bitboys.
Khronos will release details of an OpenVG 1.0 Adopter’s Program in the second half of 2005, including a Conformance Testing Program enabling conformant products to use the OpenVG trademark ensuring that conformant OpenVG implementations provide a reliable, cross-platform 2D graphics programming platform. Additionally, a reference OpenVG implementation for Windows, coded by Hybrid Graphics, will be freely available within the next month to anyone wishing to experiment with OpenVG functionality.
“Hybrid sees OpenVG as a crucial graphics technology for mobile phones and other embedded devices,” says Ville Miettinen, CTO of Hybrid Graphics. “Hybrid is a leading provider of mobile graphics technology, and we already see a strong demand in the market for a low-level 2D vector graphics standard. Hybrid’s reference implementation will soon be available - see http://www.hybrid.fi/main/openvg/index.php for more information.”
The latest version of the EGL library for interfacing with and controlling platform, memory and buffer resources – EGL 1.2 – has been extended to enable seamless rendering using both OpenGL ES and OpenVG™ enabling high-performance, accelerated, mixed-mode 2D and 3D rendering. Now that OpenVG 1.0 is publicly released, Khronos will include OpenVG educational lectures in the worldwide Khronos Developer University series to teach developers how to use OpenVG and the advantages of scalable vector graphics – for more information see http://www.khronos.org/devu/http://www.khronos.org/devu/locations.html.
Presentations at SIGGRAPH 2005
OpenGL VG: “Birds of a Feather” Meeting
Tuesday August 2nd, 4-6pm. Manhattan C, Sheraton Downtown 711 S Hope St, Los Angeles.
More information at: http://www.khronos.org/news/events/.
About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as COLLADA™, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX™, OpenML™, OpenVG, OpenMAX™ and OpenSL™ ES™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to www.khronos.org for more information.
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as COLLADA™, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX™, OpenML™ and OpenVG, and OpenSL ES™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to www.khronos.org for more information.
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Khronos, OpenVG, OpenMAX and OpenSL ES are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. COLLADA is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. used by permission by Khronos. OpenGL and OpenML are registered trademarks and the OpenGL ES logo is a trademark of Silicon Graphics Inc. used by permission by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.