VANCOUVER – The Khronos Group (www.khronos.org), an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, is announcing updates to key standards at SIGGRAPH this week. The group is hosting the first public demonstrations of OpenXR, using two prototype implementations to exercise the specification before finalization and release. Epic’s Showdown VR demo will be running portably across StarVR HMDs and Microsoft Windows Mixed Reality headsets using the OpenXR APIs via an Unreal Engine 4 plug-in. No changes are necessary to the application to run across these diverse devices, which proves the portability of OpenXR and shows it in action.
Khronos is announcing 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 is releasing 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 the Khronos NNEF Tools repository, 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. The NNEF 1.0 specification and documentation is freely available on the Khronos Website.
glTF continues to gain strong industry momentum as the open standard 3D transmission format with support from major players, including Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Adobe, Epic, Unity, and from a vibrant grassroots open-source community. In addition to the recent extensions for Google Draco mesh compression to reduce file size and to unlit materials for mobile performance and photogrammetry use cases, the glTF working group has just released a texture transform extension to facilitate texture atlases. The glTF working group is now working on a significant extension for texture transmission, using a universal super-compressable texture format that is compact to transmit and can be efficiently transcoded to a range of GPU-accelerated texture formats at high-quality levels. The industry is invited to provide requirements and feedback on the texture transmission format via GitHub.
The Khronos Education Forum launched at the show to provide an open-to-all platform on which to openly share, coordinate and collaborate on course materials for Khronos standards. Khronos will manage an Open Educational Resource hub so that educators can upload materials and receive feedback and ideas from the education community and Khronos working groups. All course materials within the Education Forum will be freely available to support educators around the world who are teaching curricula that include Khronos specifications.