Khronos demonstrates portable OpenXR apps on VR headsets from StarVR and Microsoft; NNEF 1.0 specification for Neural Network Exchange Released; New glTF extensions and ecosystem tools available; Khronos opens Education Forum to support academic programs teaching Khronos standards

SIGGRAPH, VANCOUVER - August 13, 2018 - 6:00 AM PT - The Khronos™ Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, 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 the development of open standards ecosystems and continuing its commitment to the SIGGRAPH community of interactive graphics professionals. At SIGGRAPH, Khronos will talk about the following standardization developments and initiatives:

● First public demonstrations of the OpenXR standard for portable AR and VR
At SIGGRAPH 2018, were excited to show the first public demonstrations of OpenXR™, using two prototype implementations being used to exercise the specification before finalization and release. Epics ‘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 plugin. No changes are necessary to the application to run across these diverse devices, which proves the portability of OpenXR and shows it in action. Learn more about how the OpenXR specification is being developed with this detailed OpenXR blog released today.

● NNEF 1.0 Specification Released
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 Androids 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, with more detailed information in the official NNEF 1.0 press release from today.

● glTF Ecosystem Grows; New Extensions Released
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.

● Call for Participation - Education Forum Opens for Public Contributions
The Khronos Education Forum is launched today 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.

The Khronos Group is hosting educational sessions and networking events this week at SIGGRAPH, including a full-day of BOF sessions with talks from diverse members and developers.

● Khronos BOF Sessions on glTF, WebGL, OpenXR, Vulkan, and OpenGL: On Wednesday, August 15 starting at 9 a.m., join Khronos for a full day of sessions covering Khronos standards and ecosystem updates. The BOFs will take place at the Marriott Pinnacle, a few minutes from the convention center.

● Khronos Networking Reception: everyone at SIGGRAPH is invited to join Khronos for refreshments and conversation at the annual networking reception sponsored by members NVIDIA, LunarG, Cesium, and AMD. Many Khronos BOF speakers and members will be at the reception to discuss Khronos standards, implementations, tools and trends!

● glTF Ecosystem Forum Meetup: Khronos will also be hosting a glTF Ecosystem Forum meetup at SIGGRAPH on Thursday, August 16. If you are interested in attending, please send an email to gltf_invites@khronos.org with your name, company, and interest in glTF for an invitation - spaces are limited.

See here for the full schedule of Khronos events at SIGGRAPH.

About the Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an open industry consortium of over 140 leading hardware and software companies creating advanced, royalty-free, acceleration standards for 3D graphics, Augmented and Virtual Reality, vision and machine learning. Khronos standards include Vulkan®, OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenGL® SC, WebGL™, SPIR-V™, OpenCL™, SYCL™, OpenVX™, NNEF™, COLLADA™, OpenXR™ and glTF™. Khronos members are enabled to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge accelerated platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

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Khronos, EGL, glTF, NNEF, OpenVG, OpenVX, OpenXR, SPIR, SPIR-V, SYCL, Vulkan and WebGL are trademarks or registered trademarks of The Khronos Group Inc. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Hewlett Packard Enterprise used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.