Khronos releases new graphics standards
August 8, 2011, Siggraph, Vancouver—The Khronos Group released announced new standard releases and announced new working groups for cloud processing and sensor processing and user interaction. The latest releases address cross platform desktop 3D, embedded and mobile 3D, other advanced graphics functions, and plug-in free 3-D web.
Khronos and its members organizations (currently comprised of 110+ organizations ranging across business and academia) promotes royalty-free, open standards for authoring, accelerating and accessing visual computing on a wide variety of operating systems and devices. Standards for application acceleration include: OpenGL, OpenGL|ES, OpenVG, OpenMAX, OpenSL|ES, EGL, and OpenCL. Standards for authoring and accessibility are Collada, WebGL, WebCL, and StreamInput.
The OpenGL family of APIs enables the use of all the functionality of the latest GPU hardware while maintaining portability and compatibility. The APIs allow PC, workstation, and supercomputers to access 2D and 3D content. Version 4.2 is an update that among other things enables compressed textures. New shading language changes allow byte packing into a 32-bit word as well as more efficient transfer of compressed textures into an image. A subset of these changes is also released for OpenGL|ES. Version 1.x is for fixed function hardware acceleration and version 2.x is for 3-D programmable graphics for mobile devices.
WebGL brings native 3 D in HTML5 to any WebGL enabled browser. As a result, 3-D images no longer have to be in a separate window, but can be embedded into page graphics. The graphics can be direct WebGL, or as middleware in Javascript. Currently, all the latest release browsers except Internet Explorer are WebGL enabled. For IE, the display uses a Chrome frame inside IE to display 3-D content.
OpenGL SC is a safety critical profile for safety-critical applications and can also be used as an application development platform for high-security HTML 5 applications. Although the browser can expose the GPU to attacks, the shader programs cannot access the main CPU or any system storage.
OpenCL is a new standard for developing parallel applications on the Web. This standard will help to generate parallel code across multiple cores and offers a speed up compared to Javascript. This standard will be useful for the emerging interactive graphics apps that combine general parallel compute algorithms with graphics rendering pipelines.
Another new working group is looking at a cross-platform API for streaming inputs from sensors. The proliferation of sensors in mobile devices and the growing diversity of sensor types calls for some API to enable easy access to the sensor functions without needing to program at device-level operations. The proposed specification is a graph-based API that allows synchronization of sensors through a universal system time timestamp. Although continuous sampling of data from all the sensors in a mobile device could increase power consumption, the fusion of sensors and a high-level API can reduce total data.
The working group is planning to release a specification for review in about a year. The APIs will enable easier implementation of functions like visual-based augmented reality. Intelligent sampling could reduce the sample rate, or even ignore some readings as conditions warrant, for example, you could ignore a loss of GPS data and just use the accelerometer and gyroscopes to maintain directionality. Data can be merged at the sensor level rather than at the CPU.
One open issue that the organization still has to address is that of codex fragmentation. H.264 is a candidate for general use if they can figure out how to do the processing without burning out the batteries. The organization is looking to work with other groups like W3C to identify common points and areas for cooperation.
