Today, The Khronos Group announces the ratification and public release of the Vulkan Ray Tracing provisional extensions, creating the industry’s first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for ray tracing acceleration. Primarily focused on meeting desktop market demand for both real-time and offline rendering, the release of Vulkan Ray Tracing as provisional extensions enables the developer community to provide feedback before the specifications are finalized. Comments and feedback will be collected through the Vulkan GitHub Issues Tracker and Khronos Developer Slack. Developers are also encouraged to share comments with their preferred hardware vendors. The specifications are available today on the Vulkan Registry.
Today, The Khronos Group announces that its Analytic Rendering Exploratory Group has received strong industry support and is transitioning to a full Working Group to create an analytic rendering interface API for data visualization. This new API will be called ‘ANARI’. Any interested company is invited to join Khronos and participate in the ANARI™ Working Group under the consortium’s multi-company governance process to have a voice and a vote in the creation of this open, royalty-free standard. This initiative is expected to be of particular interest to any company creating scientific visualization rendering engines, libraries and applications.
Today, The Khronos Group and the Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum, education and research complex, with 19 museums and the National Zoological Park, announce their Collaborative Agreement for the increase and diffusion of knowledge using 3D scanned models from the Smithsonian collections. Working with Khronos, the Smithsonian publicly launched their Open Access initiative today, which included the release of approximately 2.8 million 2D images and 3D models into the public domain with the internationally recognized Creative Commons Zero (CCO) license. Additionally, a variety of platforms will be launched to make its collection media, collections data, and research data available for educational and research endeavors, creative reuse, computational analysis and innovative explorations.
The Khronos Group announces the release of the Vulkan 1.2 specification for GPU acceleration. This release integrates 23 proven extensions into the core Vulkan API, bringing significant developer-requested access to new hardware functionality, improved application performance, and enhanced API usability. Multiple GPU vendors have certified conformant implementations, and significant open source tooling is expected during January 2020.
Today The Khronos Group, announces the ratification and public release of the OpenVX™ 1.3 specification, along with code samples and a prototype conformance test suite. OpenVX is a royalty-free open standard for portable, optimized, and power-efficient vision and machine learning inferencing acceleration, vital to embedded and real-time use cases, such as face-, body-, and gesture-tracking, smart video surveillance, advanced driver assistance systems, object and scene reconstruction, augmented reality, visual inspection, robotics, and more. Also available today is an open source implementation of OpenVX 1.3 for Raspberry Pi to make OpenVX widely accessible to developers. The new specification can be found on the OpenVX registry.
Today The Khronos Group announces a significant expansion in the ecosystem for the NNEF™ (Neural Network Exchange Format) open, royalty-free standard that enables hardware manufacturers to reliably exchange trained neural networks between training frameworks and inference engines. New and improved NNEF open source convertors, including for TensorFlow Lite and ONNX, enables NNEF to be used to carry trained frameworks from a wider range of training frameworks. A set of extensions to the NNEF 1.0 specification enable NNEF files to contain a richer network of operations and topologies. Finally, an openly available NNEF Model Zoo enables inferencing engines to test their reliable import of NNEF models. More information on NNEF can be found at the NNEF Home Page.
The Khronos Group announces the ratification and public releaseof the OpenXR™ 1.0 specification together with publicly available implementations and substantial ecosystem momentum. OpenXR is a unifying, royalty-free, open standard that provides high-performance, cross-platform access to virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR)— collectively known as XR—platforms and devices.
The Khronos® Group announces new 3D Commerce™ Working Group and key updates to flagship standards WebGL™, glTF™, and Vulkan®. In the spirit of continued commitment to the SIGGRAPH community of interactive graphics professionals, Khronos delivers a number of developments and initiatives.
The Khronos Group today announces the formation of an Exploratory Group to investigate the creation of standards and guidelines for the production and distribution of real-time 3D representations of products, so they can be experienced realistically and consistently across all platforms and devices, such as mobile, Web and Augmented Reality (AR) or Virtual Reality (VR) solutions. To gather industry input, the Exploratory Group is open to any company without cost or IP licensing obligations. If there is industry support, Khronos will form a Working Group to enable any interested company to join Khronos and participate under its proven multi-company governance process.
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.
The Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, today announces the creation of the Vulkan Safety Critical Working Group, to enable safety critical industries to take advantage of advancements in GPU graphics and compute acceleration, and display control, at the highest levels of safety integrity.
The Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, today announces a request for industry feedback to gauge interest in developing a new low-level, heterogeneous communications open standard that could transform the way applications are developed for High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC) systems. If there is industry support, then Khronos would create a working group and invite any interested company to participate for a voice and a vote in creating and evolving a multi-vendor standard under Khronos’ proven multi-company governance process. Those interested in finding out more and providing feedback are invited to visit the Khronos Heterogeneous Communication feedback page.
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.
The Khronos Group announces updates to key standards and opens the Khronos Education Forum at SIGGRAPH. With various Khronos events throughout the week, including a day of Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions and its annual networking reception, Khronos is accelerating open standards ecosystems and continuing its commitment to the SIGGRAPH community of interactive graphics professionals. At SIGGRAPH, Khronos will be talking about the following standards developments and initiatives: NNEF 1.0 Specification Finalized, OpenXR Demonstrates Specification in Hardware Implementation, Ecosystem Grows; New Extensions Released and a Call for Participation - Education Forum Opens for Public Contribution. In addition to standards updates, The Khronos Group is hosting educational sessions and networking events this week, including a full-day of BOF sessions with talks from various members.
The Khronos Group announces the ratification and the public release of the NNEF 1.0 (Neural Network Exchange Format) specification. After gathering feedback from the industry review of the provisional specification, Khronos releases NNEF 1.0 as a stable, flexible, and extensible open standard for hardware manufacturers to reliably deploy optimized, accelerated neural network inferencing onto diverse edge devices. Together with this release, an ecosystem of tools is now also available on GitHub, including an NNEF parser and converters from Tensorflow and Caffe. Importers into popular inferencing environments, including Android’s Neural Network API (NNAPI) and Khronos’ OpenVX, are also being developed.