The Khronos Group today announced a call for participation in a new initiative to define a cross-vendor, royalty-free, open standard for access to modern virtual reality (VR) devices.
The rapid growth of the virtual reality market has led to platform fragmentation, forcing VR applications and engines to be ported and customized to run on multiple VR runtimes, and requiring VR sensors and displays to be integrated with multiple driver interfaces. This fragmentation slows the widespread availability of compelling VR experiences, creating added expense for developers wishing to support multiple VR devices, and hindering the adoption of innovative user interface technologies.
Any company interested to participate is strongly encouraged to join Khronos for a voice and a vote in the development process. Design contributions from any member are welcome. Some of the Khronos member companies helping to get this initiative underway include AMD, ARM, Epic Games, Google, Intel, LunarG, NVIDIA, Oculus, Razer, Tobii, Valve and VeriSilicon. More information on this initiative and how to join the Khronos Group is available at:
- VR landing page
- Press Release
- Khronos and VR at SIGGRAPH Asia
- VR community chat
The Khronos Group is proud to announce that Razer has joined as a Contributor Member. Razer is a world leader in connected devices and software for gamers. Its award-winning design and technology span systems, peripherals, audio and wearable technologies. Razer co-founded OSVR, an open-source platform that integrates VR, AR and mixed reality hardware and software APIs that support a universal VR ecosystem.
The Khronos Group is proud to announce that Igalia S.L. has joined as a Contributor Member. Igalia is a Free Software consultancy with headquarters in Spain and developers all around the world. They are passionate about their work, active in their communities, eager to learn and happy to contribute their knowledge. In short, they are inspired to make the world a better place through Free Software, and driven by the knowledge that they can.
Khronos has over 130 members who are helping to change the way the world works with information. To increase the diversity of our ranks, we have added a new Associate membership level that makes it easier for companies with fewer than 20 employees to join and contribute to the standards that we promote. Complete details are available on the Khronos website.
Khronos Group members DMP and CogniVue ink important licensing agreement. DMP will be licensing CogniVue’s APEX Image Cognition Processing (ICP) technology.
Imagination Technologies, a leading multimedia technologies company, announces the latest IP cores in its ground-breaking PowerVR Series6 GPU core family. The PowerVR G6230 and G6430 GPU IP cores are the latest in a growing family of PowerVR Series6 GPU cores and deliver high compute efficiency while minimising power and bandwidth requirements. Rogue meets requirements for compute APIs including OpenCL 1.x and Renderscript Compute, delivering an optimal balance of performance versus power consumption for mobile and embedded devices. All members of the Series6 family are designed to support all features of the latest graphics APIs including the next generation of the OpenGL ES API, OpenGL 3.x/4.x, and DirectX10 with certain family members extending their capabilities to full WHQL-compliant DirectX11.1 functionality.
The Khronos Group just wrapped up another tour in Asia. Slides from the visit and a few photos are available online.
In addition to TransGaming, Khronos counts as member companies such leading organizations as Apple, Intel, Nokia, Samsung, Sony, AMD and NVidia, as well as over 100 others. Given that kind of membership list, and a singular focus on creating open standard APIs, we felt that Khronos was absolutely the right umbrella under which to develop a new industry standard for input.
Jon Peddie Research is reporting that Japanese 3D IP provider Digital Media Professionals IPOed this week and rallied the first day moving from ¥2,400 to ¥3,050. According to CEO Tatsuo Yamamoto and many others, this has been the most successful debut on the Tokyo Stock Exchange since the March Tsunami disaster. DMP is a member of the Khronos Group, and we congratulate them on their debut on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
Intel plans to buy Wind River Systems for $884 million. Wind River’s software helps companies develop and test software for devices like rear-seat entertainment systems in cars and avionics in defense aircraft.