Khronos Blog

Khronos just returned from a dynamic and productive week at SIGGRAPH Asia 2024, which took place from December 3–6 in the bustling city of Tokyo, Japan. This annual gathering of some of the world’s most innovative minds in graphics, XR, and emerging spatial computing technologies provided the perfect backdrop for the Khronos Group to showcase its leadership in shaping the future of 3D graphics and immersive experiences. With key announcements, a series of well-attended Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions, and a vibrant networking event, Khronos reaffirmed its position at the forefront of standardization for the 3D industry.

The glTF Sample Viewer is an essential part of the glTF ecosystem. Developed by the Khronos 3D Formats Working Group, this open-source JavaScript viewer highlights the latest features of glTF, renders glTF files directly in a web browser, and can be easily integrated into other JavaScript projects using glTF. Working closely with UX3D, a software company specializing in 3D rendering and user interfaces, Khronos has released version 1.1 of the Viewer, offering substantial functionality and usability improvements. In this blog, we’ll explore the new features of the glTF Sample Viewer 1.1 and share insights on how we’ve made it easier to integrate Sample Viewer into web applications.

Today, with the release of Vulkan 1.3.302, Khronos is proud to announce two new encode extensions. First, the highly anticipated Encode AV1 extension enhances Vulkan Video by adding AV1 encode functionality to complement its existing AV1 decode support. This milestone means that Vulkan Video now provides full decode AND encode acceleration for the H.264, H.265 and AV1 codec standards. Additionally, the new Encode Quantization Map extension introduces advanced encoding features for all supported codecs to Vulkan Video developers for the first time. We are confident these extensions provide the necessary building blocks for your advanced Vulkan Video applications!

The SYCL™ Working Group at Khronos® has been hard at work advancing the ecosystem for this open, royalty-free, cross-platform abstraction layer that enables code for heterogeneous and offload processors to be written using modern ISO C++. Through active public development, SYCL continues to grow as developers contribute and provide feedback, shaping the future of this portable programming model. Recently, the SYCL Working Group announced the release of Revision 9 of the SYCL 2020 Specification and exciting upcoming features.

ANARI™ (ANonymous Application Rendering Interface) is an open standard 3D rendering engine API developed by the Khronos Group, offering portable access to advanced 3D rendering techniques, such as ray tracing and global illumination. ANARI’s cross-platform capabilities make it widely adopted in scientific visualization, delivering performance and flexibility through implementations like AMD’s RadeonProRender, Intel’s OSPRay, and NVIDIA’s VisRTX.

This year, the Khronos 3D Formats Working Group has reached several significant milestones along the roadmap for developing glTF into an interoperable spatial computing format, and has several extension development efforts underway. Many key extensions for spatial consistency, improved material rendering and consistent render fidelity have now reached the Review Draft stage, where they are ready for detailed review and initial testing. There are also several new extensions in the Initial Draft phase, where the Working Group is seeking directional input to ensure specification development aligns with the community’s needs. We are cranking and getting work done! This blog will review recent ecosystem updates, explain current specs nearing release candidacy, and highlight opportunities for community input, inviting glTF stakeholders to share useful feedback to shape the future development of the glTF ecosystem.

OpenXR, the cross-platform open standard for virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) development, has become a vital component of the XR industry by providing a unified API that enables developers to create immersive experiences across various platforms and devices. By eliminating the need for multiple proprietary APIs, OpenXR simplifies development processes and broadens the scope for creating diverse XR applications.

SIGGRAPH is one of the world’s most significant and long-standing conferences focused on computer graphics and interactive techniques. For the Khronos Group, SIGGRAPH represents an essential opportunity to connect with the developers, engineers, artists, and technical professionals that make up the primary users of Khronos standards like ANARI, glTF, OpenXR, WebGL, and Vulkan.

The Vulkan® Working Group has released the VK_KHR_pipeline_binary extension, enabling direct retrieval of binary data associated with individual pipelines, bypassing the VkPipelineCache mechanism, and enabling applications to explicitly manage pipeline caching.

On June 21, 2024 the Vulkan® SC™ working group at the Khronos® Group released the Vulkan SC 1.0.15 specification, the latest maintenance update to the “Vulkan Safety Critical” open standard API, which enables GPU-accelerated graphics and computation to be deployed in systems that are certified to meet industry functional safety standards. 

Standards development is a highly collaborative undertaking within and across standards development organizations (SDOs). We are active in both 3GPP and MPEG working groups, and our work on mobile applications for 3GPP inspired us to tackle an emerging challenge within MPEG: interactive scene description for XR applications. Ultimately, our search for a scene description format that could be used for last-mile XR scene description and

Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) is a high-performance, extensible software platform for collaboratively creating, editing, and simulating complex 3D scenes. OpenUSD is more than a file format and scene representation—it's an extensible framework of libraries, tools, and plugins. This includes the Hydra rendering framework, an open source OpenUSD framework that decouples scene descriptions from renderers, and the Storm renderer, a rasterizer aimed at performance and scalability.

ANARI™ is the industry’s open standard, cross-platform 3D rendering engine API developed by the Khronos Group to provide portable access to sophisticated 3D functionality including ray tracing and global illumination. ANARI is already widely used by scientific visualization applications and is implemented over multiple rendering engines, including AMD’s RadeonProRender, Intel’s OSPRay, and NVIDIA’s VisRTX, among others. ANARI is developed with full public access to the specification and has recently incorporated significant community feedback, including improvements to the object interface, better error handling through guaranteed API stream robustness, revamped runtime feature queries, directly mapped array parameters, improved volume shading, and compatibility with the Khronos glTF™ Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) materials.

Today, the Khronos 3D Formats Working Group is pleased to announce that the glTF 2.0 Interactivity Extension (KHR_interactivity) specification draft is available for public review and feedback before ratification. This new extension uses behavior graphs, enabling content creators to add logic and behaviors to glTF assets, with a focus on safety, portability and ease of implementation.

In a world where AI, HPC and Safety-Critical acceleration is shifting toward heterogeneous architectures that integrate processors with different architectures from multiple vendors, the need for seamless interoperability and shared open standards has never been more critical. That's why the UXL Foundation (Unified Acceleration) and the Khronos Group have entered into a liaison agreement to help accelerate the evolution of open accelerated heterogeneous programming.