khronosgroup Archives - Microcontroller Tips

The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating graphics and compute interoperability standards, publicly releases the OpenVG 1.1 Lite Provisional Specification for advanced 2D vector and raster graphics, with conformance tests placed into open source under the Apache 2.0 license. OpenVG 1.1 Lite enables this high-quality 2D vector graphics API to be fully accelerated by any OpenGL ES 2.0-compatible GPU for the first time, significantly increasing the range of devices on which it can be deployed. The Provisional Specification is released in markdown format on GitHub to enable the developer community to provide input and feedback before the specification and conformance tests are finalized.

OpenVG provides a low-level hardware acceleration interface for sophisticated 2D vector graphics, ideal for smooth and fluidly scalable user interfaces. Since its inception in 2008, OpenVG has been widely deployed in consumer electronics, handhelds, wearables, and automotive devices, as it can be accelerated by low-power, low-cost 2D graphics hardware.

The OpenVG 1.1 Lite specification relaxes the accuracy requirements of stroke path rasterization and normalizes the stencil/blending modes of OpenVG 1.1 so that they can be directly accelerated by any OpenGL ES 2.0-compatible 3D GPU, while maintaining high rendering quality. With this update, OpenVG can be even more widely deployed on almost any existing or new 3D-accelerated devices and platforms.

OpenVG 1.1 Lite includes the following updates to OpenVG 1.1:

● Stencil paint modes have been made optional;

● Complex stroke path generation (Bezier cusp cases) conformance has been relaxed;

● Lighten and Darken blending modes have been made optional.

OpenVG 1.1 Lite has been developed by Khronos members, including Ajou University, Digital Media Professionals Inc., and TAKUMI.

The KhronosGroup, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, announces the ratification and public release of 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 new specification can be found on the Khronos website and via GitHub.

“The working group is excited to launch the 1.0 version of the OpenXR specification, and the feedback from the community on the provisional specification released in March has been invaluable to getting us to this significant milestone,” said Brent Insko, OpenXR working group chair and lead XR architect at Intel. “Our work continues as we now finalize a comprehensive test suite, integrate key game engine support, and plan the next set of features to evolve a truly vibrant, cross-platform standard for XR platforms and devices. Now is the time for software developers to start putting OpenXR to work.”

After gathering feedback from the XR community during the public review of the provisional specification, improvements were made to the OpenXR input subsystem, game engine editor support, and loader. With this 1.0 release, the working group will evolve the standard while maintaining full backwards compatibility from this point onward, giving software developers and hardware vendors a solid foundation upon which to deliver incredible, portable, user experiences.

Together with the specification release, OpenXR is receiving continued ecosystem support from Khronos member companies. OpenXR implementations from members are shipping this week, including the ‘Monado’ OpenXR open source implementation from Collabora, the OpenXR runtime for Windows Mixed Reality headsets from Microsoft, an Oculus OpenXR implementation for Rift, as well as Oculus Quest support coming upon ratification of OpenXR 1.0. Epic Games also plans to release OpenXR 1.0 support in Unreal Engine.

At SIGGRAPH 2019, OpenXR members Epic Games, Microsoft and Varjo will demonstrate XR applications targeting distinct VR and AR platforms, all while using the same OpenXR API, demonstrating how the standard reduces industry fragmentation through application portability. The demonstrations will take place during the OpenXR Birds of a Feather (BOF) presentation at 1:00 p.m. on July 31, as well as during the Khronos Networking Reception taking place at 5:30 p.m. on July 31. No passes are required for either event and all are welcome to attend.