During this tutorial held at ISMAR 2021, four world-renowned leaders in standards development with a focus on Augmented Reality, presented on open standards for AR interoperability. Proceedings from the session are now available including presentations and video. A website for the ISMAR21 tutorial organized by Christine Perey with the support of Khronos Group, ETSI and NIST on the topic of Interoperability and Standards for AR is now live.

Interoperability specifications, such as Khronos open standards, can significantly widen their market recognition and adoption by becoming International Standards. International Standards are recognized throughout the world, and in many countries form the regulatory basis for public procurement of IT goods and services. An International Standard also provides important assurances of stability and longevity.

Khronos was approved as a ISO/IEC JTC 1 PAS Submitter In May 2021. The first specification that Khronos will submit for transposition to an International Standard is glTF 2.0. As a step in this process, Khronos has today released a new canonical glTF 2.0.0 specification. If the transposition ballot at JTC 1 succeeds, glTF 2.0.0 will become a JTC 1 International Standard some time in 2022.

In a recent Khronos blog on consumer-accessible LiDAR, Sandy Ressler of NIST wrote, “The capture of 3D objects…will be yet another technique to supplement our existing toolbox of memory recorders.” In an article published the same week, the New York Times agreed, writing “Constructing 3D models with photogrammetry allows journalists to share objects and environments with their audiences in a comprehensive, immersive way that can’t be achieved with photography or videography alone.”

The Times has released a set of guides to the capture, processing, and web delivery of 3D scenes, developed by their R&D department using a variety of tools, many in open source. They also leverage Khronos standards such as glTF with BasisU and Draco compression for publishing interactive 3D models on the Web. The products and technologies of many Khronos partners and members are also used, including Cesium’s 3D Tiles, an OGC standard based on glTF to stream large 3D models. Explore these guides to capturing images for photogrammetry using mobile devices, processing and aligning 3D scenes, and web delivery here.

Khronos looks forward to continuing to enable the evolution of reality capture and delivery, including the use of new generation sensors such as LiDAR to make the process ever more accessible.

RedGamingTech’s Paul Eccleston sits down with Khronos President Neil Trevett to discuss the technologies Khronos has been working on with Vulkan, including ray tracing, and revolutionary new tech such as glTF, 3DCommerce and OpenXR, which has potentially huge ramifications for virtual reality. As well as the current roadmap for Khronos standards, and more…

The field of 3D Computer graphics has grown from a niche technical curiosity in the mid-1970s to mass appeal and distribution via movies and games. We’ve seen applications grow from flying logos, to highly engaging real-time renderings in games, to synthetic humans and de-aged actors in movies finally crossing the “uncanny valley” to be nearly indistinguishable from reality. However, the creation of 3D assets - computer graphics objects and the worlds they inhabit - still requires highly skilled technicians and artists, presenting a bottleneck to more widespread applications, such as creating 3D graphics for websites and E-Commerce. LiDAR has the potential to alleviate this bottleneck.

glTF has officially created a dedicated glTF Slack Workspace! This workspace will enable the community to have more focused conversations. The current glTF channel on the KhronosDevs Workspace will be archived soon, so please head over to the new glTF Slack workspace.

3D Commerce Working Group Chair, Shrenik Sadalgi, explains how making stone soup (each contributing what they have) makes a meal for the whole village. Over the past year and a half, the working group members have brought their expertise in retail and 3D technology to bear on optimizing the process of using glTF for e-commerce applications to benefit the whole industry. In that time, they’ve managed to improve the utility of glTF for their purposes and create tools to help artists and tool providers achieve more consistent results.

The Virtual Learning Factory Toolkit (VLFT) project is a pioneering program commissioned by the European Union using virtual and augmented reality to enhance engineering education programs across Europe. Five EU partners make up the VLFT Consortium, including Estonia’s Tallinn University of Technology, Hungary’s Institute for Computer Science and Control, Italy’s Politecnico di Milano, National Research Council of Italy, and Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology. Using Khronos® standards, the VLFT consortium has created a suite of tools to gamify learning, strengthen information and communication technology (ICT) skills, and better prepare students for jobs in 21st century manufacturing.

In this blog, the 3D Formats Working Group explains the recently released PBR extensions: KHR_materials_volume, KHR_materials_ior, and KHR_materials_specular.

Shrenik Sadalgi, Chair of the 3D Commerce Working Group, explores how 3D merchandising has demonstrated its potential application as a transformative technology across many industries, and how scaling 3D immersive experiences across platforms and channels is coming soon via the efforts of glTF and the 3D Commerce Working Group.

Today, the Khronos Group announces the public release of the latest set of Physically Based Rendering (PBR) material extensions for the Khronos glTF™ 3D asset format. The new extensions enable material properties such as refraction, color attenuation, and volumetric properties to be used by diverse renderers from real-time rasterization to production-class path-tracing. glTF is a flexible, royalty-free asset format from Khronos designed for efficient run-time transmission and loading of 3D scenes and models on a wide variety of platforms including web browsers, mobile devices, PC desktops and the cloud. Leading rendering engines such as Babylon.js, Google’s Filament, and three.js already support some or all of the new PBR extensions, together with applications including Adobe’s Substance 3D Stager, Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE Platform, DGG RapidCompact and UX3D’s Gestaltor.

Companies no longer need to manufacture their product before they create assets to promote it. New, digital technologies are poised to transform engineering and design data into easy-to-share visualizations for powerful online product experiences. Resulting in realistic 3D marketing assets that, thanks to a fast-developing open standard asset format called glTF, can be viewed and manipulated on any device.

Cesium released CesiumJS 1.83 and added support for KTX 2.0 and Basis Universal compressed textures, bringing transmission and runtime optimizations for global imagery. Cesium added support for glTF models with the KHR_texture_basisu extension and added support for 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit float KTX2 specular environment maps.

As the number of 3D assets used in e-commerce rapidly increases, the need to embed semantic information describing virtual products within real-time 3D formats such as glTF™ becomes ever more urgent. 3D asset files that contain descriptive and administrative metadata such as product descriptions, details on intellectual property rights, creation and modification dates and other detailed authoring history - all in multiple languages - will enable the management of 3D virtual product catalogs, and the sharing of assets between vendors, retailers and end user platforms at industrial scale.

Join the Khronos Group’s 3D Commerce Working Group members making a difference in the world of 3D graphics from popular retail and tech companies like Amazon, IKEA, Microsoft, Shopify, Wayfair, and more as they take a deep dive into the ways people experience 3D graphics on the web and in stores. This virtual event highlights the recently announced Viewer Certification Program that was created to lower the barriers to 3D asset creation and implementation. This event shares the vision for a future empowered by 3D across education, medical, design, advertising, art, and more. You’ll learn what Pervasive 3D is, why it’s worth working towards, and what’s next.