STIQ Ltd (StyleIntelligence Ltd) interviewed 60 plus companies in the nascent ‘Immersive Retail’ niche focusing on the use of 3D, AR and VR in retail use cases. The reports intent is to provide readers with an insight into the global B2B market for 3D/AR/VR technology for use by retailers (ecommerce pureplay retailers, physical retailers and multi-channel retailers). Learn how the new 3D Commerce working group from The Khronos Group, glTF and OpenXR fit into the highly fragmented 3D, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality in Commerce. The report is now available for download.

The latest version of the Oculus Unreal Engine Integration adds support for Vulkan on Oculus Quest and Oculus Go. Unity told us they will add the same “later this year.”

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.

Intel’s Brent Insko has taken over as the Chair of the OpenXR working group after Epic’s Nick Whiting passed the torch. The pair say the OpenXR effort is still going strong, and a progress update is planned for March. Read more from the interview on Road To VR.

The Khronos Group would like to welcome its newest Associate Member DGG (Darmstadt Graphics Group GmbH). DGG develops RapidCompact, a software that reduces the size of 3D data sets in a fully-automatic fashion, optimizing 3D models for different use cases such as VR, AR and 3D on the Web. Being a spinoff of the Fraunhofer Society, DGG embraces innovation as well as standardization efforts, which has made them a strong supporter of Khronos’ glTF format.

Mozilla is committed to the next wave of creativity in the open Web, in which people can access, create and share immersive VR and AR experiences across platforms and devices. Together with the Khronos Group and developers of existing open source Blender tools, we are providing a complete GL Transmission Format (glTF) import and export add-on for Blender, offering a powerful and free round-trip workflow for WebXR creators. This effort builds on the work of existing open source tools, and adds support for the newest Blender and glTF features. The tool itself along with further technical details will be available in the coming weeks. The blueprint for the collaboration model that allowed us to get there already exists. This article will explain how we got there, how this model works, and why it can accelerate the ecosystem.

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.

NVIDIA has released the new VRWorks Graphics SDK V3.0 for application and headset developers along with the NVIDIA display driver 411.63, both updated for NVIDIA’s new Turing GPU generation. The drivers are available for download and the SDK has been posted. The SDK includes an OpenGL sample to demonstrate Turing’s “Variable Rate Shading” (VRS) feature showing how to vary fragment load across the screen, e.g. for foveated rendering. Another sample demonstrates Turing’s “Multi-View Rendering” (MVR) feature by showing how to render the same scene from different viewpoints. There are Vulkan versions of the samples too.

Nikkei Electronics Magazine interviewed Neil Trevett, president of The Khronos Group about recent Khronos API highlights, including OpenXR. During the interview, Neil mentioned that we have received many supporters to OpenXR from broad industry and VR/AR community.

The Khronos Group would like to welcome its newest Contributor Member Magic Leap. Magic Leap is working on a head-mounted virtual retinal display, called Magic Leap One, which superimposes 3D computer-generated imagery over real world objects.

The Khronos Group would like to welcome Zero Latency as its newest Contributor Member. Zero Latency is the pioneer and global leader in warehouse scale, free-roam, multiplayer virtual reality entertainment, with 18 venues in 9 countries across 4 continents.

A new blog post on UploadVR provides a blueprint for people to think about the spatial computing revolution over the next six years. Part of this future looks how a combined roll-out of OpenXR with the broader adoption of formats like glTF may allow us to start to see the underpinnings of an actual interconnected universe like the OASIS or Metaverse.

jmonkeyengine, a complete 3D game development suite written in Java just announced glTF 2.0 support. Also included in this release is support for Physically Based Rendering (PBR) and VR.

The Khronos Group was at SIGGRAPH Asia this year with talks from several Khronos members including NVIDIA and Unity, as well as a talk from the Khronos Melbourne Chapter Leader. Neil Trevett, President of the Khronos Group, gave an overview of the Khronos ecosystem. If you are interested in learning more about Khronos standards for 3D, VR, AR and Neural Networks, be sure to take a few minutes to read Neil’s presentation.