Khronos Group

The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard, royalty-free APIs to enable the authoring and accelerated playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge 3D platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

On the 31st July, 2006 it was announced at SIGGRAPH that control of the OpenGL specification would be passed to the group. [ [http://www.khronos.org/news/press/releases/opengl_arb_to_pass_control_of_opengl_specification_to_khronos_group/ OpenGL ARB to pass control of OpenGL specification to Khronos Group] , Khronos press release] [ [http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-16157838_ITM OpenGL ARB to Pass Control of OpenGL Specification to Khronos Group] , AccessMyLibrary Archive]

An article at [http://electronicimaging.org/program/06/conferences/index.cfm?fuseaction=6074 SPIE Electronic Imaging 2006 Multimedia on Mobile Devices] gives an overview of many mobile APIs, mostly from Khronos. [Pulli, Kari. " [http://research.nokia.com/files/pulli_spie06.pdf New APIs for Mobile Graphics] " ]

History

The Khronos Group was founded in 2000 by a number of media centric companies, including 3Dlabs, ATI, Discreet, Evans & Sutherland, Intel, NVIDIA, SGI and Sun Microsystems. Today the Khronos Group has roughly 100 member companies, over 30 adopters and twenty-four conformant members [ [http://www.khronos.org/members/conformant Khronos Group Conformant members] ] .

Working Groups

*OpenGL, a cross-platform computer graphics API.
*OpenCL, a cross-platform computation API. [ [http://www.khronos.org/news/press/releases/khronos_launches_heterogeneous_computing_initiative/ Khronos launches heterogeneous computing initiative] , Khronos press release, 2008-06-16]
*COLLADA, a file-format intended to facilitate interchange of 3D assets.
*glFX, a run-time effects API for OpenGL
*OpenGL SC, safety critical profile designed to meet the needs of the safety-critical market
*OpenKODE, an API for operating system resource's abstraction, including file system access and mathematical operations
*OpenGL ES, an Embedded Systems version of OpenGL appropriate for use on cell phones, portable gaming devices, and more.
*OpenVG, an API for accelerating processing of 2D vector graphics .
*OpenMAX, a layered set of three programming interfaces of various abstraction levels, providing access to multimedia functionality.
*OpenSL ES, an audio API tuned for embedded systems, standardizing access to features such as 3D positional audio and MIDI playback.
*Embedded Graphics Library, EGL is a native Platform Graphics Interface
*OpenWF, APIs for 2D graphics composition and display control
*OpenML, an API for "capturing, transporting, processing, displaying, and synchronizing digital media."

Resources

* [http://www.khronos.org/ The Khronos Group: Open Standards, Royalty Free, Dynamic Media APIs]
* [http://www.opengl.org/ OpenGL: The Industry's Foundation for High Performance Graphics]
* [http://www.collada.org/ COLLADA: An open digital-asset exchange schema for the interactive 3D industry]
* [http://www.khronos.org/news/reviews/ The Khronos Group Media References]
* [http://www.khronosopenspace.com Khronos Open Space]

References