Vulkan Ray Tracing Final Versions Released
 Khronos® has released the final versions of the set of extension specifications that seamlessly integrate ray tracing into the existing Vulkan® framework. This is a significant milestone as it is the industry’s first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for ray tracing acceleration - and can be deployed either using existing GPU compute or dedicated ray tracing cores. Vulkan Ray Tracing will be familiar to anyone who has used DirectX Raytracing (DXR) in DirectX 12, but also introduces advanced functionality such as the ability to load balance ray tracing setup operations onto the host CPU. Although ray tracing will be first deployed on desktop systems, these Vulkan extensions have been designed to enable and encourage ray tracing to also be deployed on mobile. Additionally, Khronos has posted a blog on “Vulkan Ray Tracing Best Practices for Hybrid Rendering” which explores ray tracing techniques in Wolfenstein: Youngblood. Learn more about the structure of the extensions, acceleration structures, deferred host operations, ray tracing pipelines, ray queries, and creation of an acceleration structure here.
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Streamlining 3D Commerce with Material Variant Support in glTF Assets
 In the world of e-commerce, many products come in different options, or variants. When shopping online, for example, colors and materials of a brand of shoe might have an image representing each option. And now, in addition to using 2D images, more and more retailers are starting to use 3D and AR to merchandise products in online channels to enable customers to more fully experience products or view items in their environment in rich 3D. Each time a customer views a different colored shoe, there is a good chance that another complete 3D model is being loaded just to display that color variant. This leads to increased download times and wasted bandwidth as the files contain a lot of redundant data, including downloading exactly the same geometry multiple times. In turn this causes increased memory usage on the device, and slower interactivity, resulting in a poor customer experience. Learn how the Khronos Group and the 3D Commerce™ Working Group is improving this.
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Khronos Releases Wave of New glTF PBR 3D Material Capabilities
 Khronos has announced the release of a set of new Physically Based Rendering (PBR) material extensions for glTF™. PBR enables developers and artists to achieve photorealism through rendering parameters that correspond to real-world physical properties of materials in 3D assets. These new extensions for Clear Coat, Transmission and Sheen build on the existing PBR capabilities of glTF 2.0, and together with additional upcoming extensions, are creating a powerful, interoperable, physically-based material model for the glTF ecosystem. More...
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WebGL Meetup Recording Now Available
 WebGL™ held a virtual meetup led by Ken Russell, WebGL Group Chair and Software Engineer at Google, was joined by Working Group members Emmett Lalish, Google; Alban Denoyel, Sketchfab; Rami Santina, BlackSmithSoft; Lindsay Kay, xeolabs.com; William Eastcott, Playcanvas; Ib Green, Unfolded; and Jason Carter, Microsoft to discuss updates, WebGL implementations, and more. In case you missed the meetup, you can catch it here.
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Vulkan Ray Tracing Best Practices for Hybrid Rendering
 The final Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions that seamlessly integrate ray tracing functionality alongside Vulkan’s rasterization framework, makes Vulkan the industry’s first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for ray tracing acceleration. The final ray tracing functionality is defined by a set of 5 extensions, namely VK_KHR_acceleration_structure, VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline, VK_KHR_ray_query, VK_KHR_pipeline_library, and VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations. ISVs played a pivotal role in shaping the extension to enable hybrid rendering—where rasterization and ray tracing are used in tandem to achieve compelling levels of visual fidelity and interactivity. One example of a game using this hybrid approach in Vulkan is the implementation of ray traced reflections in Wolfenstein: Youngblood, a technique which we will be looking at in-depth in this post, while also discussing more general aspects of real-time ray tracing with Vulkan. Wolfenstein: Youngblood necessarily shipped with an earlier version of Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions, but the techniques used in the game are described here, and can be fully implemented, using the final production extensions that all developers should use now that they are available.
This post assumes some familiarity with the Vulkan API.
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Data Parallel C++: Mastering DPC++ for Programming of Heterogeneous Systems using C++ and SYCL
 Members from the SYCL Working Group contributed to this book that covers how to accelerate C++ programs using data parallelism. This open access book enables C++ programmers to be at the forefront of this exciting and important new development that is helping to push computing to new levels. It is full of practical advice, detailed explanations, and code examples to illustrate key topics.
Order your copy from the Khronos bookstore today!
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Codeplay Blog:
SYCL for Safety Practitioners – a 3-part series
 Codeplay recognized that there are few resources for safety practitioners and programmers looking at developing applications with SYCL™ that are required to meet functional safety requirements. This three part series of blog posts will give readers an overview of what they need to know about using SYCL in a safety-critical environment. The information is most relevant to safety practitioners working with SYCL, but equally will help to educate developers working on low-level drivers for DSPs and other processors.
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SIGGRAPH Asia 2020
December 4-13, 2020
 The Khronos Group presentation “Open Standards Update” at SIGGRAPH Asia will be available on-demand from December 4-13, 2020 for anyone with a Basic Attendee pass or higher.
Additionally, a live 30-minute Q&A will be held with Khronos President, Neil Trevett, on Thursday, December 10th at 10:30am Philippine Standard Time / GMT+8 (Wed, December 9th at 6:30pm Pacific Standard Time / GMT-8). More...
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XR Kaigi
December 8-10, 2020
 Members from Khronos' OpenXR WG will be presenting an OpenXR update, a tutorial on how interactions are modeled and handled, and how to future-proof XR apps.
Presenters will be Brent Insko, Intel; Ryan Pavlik, Collabora and Lachlan Ford, Microsoft. More...
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IFC Summit 2020
December 16, 2020
 The Khronos Group is a proud media sponsor for The TIFCA International Future Computing Summit. Neil Trevett, President of The Khronos Group, is also a featured speaker.
While the IFC Summit is primarily an invitation-only virtual event, respondents that complete the Foresight 2020: Cross Platform Survey qualify for a ticket while supplies last. More...
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Embedded World Conference
March 1-4, 2021
 The Khronos Group President, Neil Trevett, will present a keynote, "The State of Khronos Standards Powering the Future of Embedded Vision & Inferencing." More...
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