Altia, Inc. announces that its HMI development tools, Altia Design® and Altia DeepScreen® have been selected for use in its “Energy Aware” home appliance platform. Altia HMI software provides embedded systems developers with the capability to create complete custom graphical user interfaces and graphics code without programming graphics. These working interface prototypes are quickly deployable to an Altera Corporation Cyclone® series FPGA and provides power line networking capability to home-appliance applications with LONWORKS® Power Line transceiver board from Echelon Corporation. Altia DeepScreen supports OpenGL ES. The Altia OpenGL ES DeepScreen target is OS independent and may be ported to any environment with or without an OS. This target is suitable for both high and low end systems that have OpenGL. The OpenGL ES target is very lightweight and takes advantage of hardware acceleration wherever possible (for example, when rotating or scaling images). It all adds up to exceptional embedded target performance. Together, Altia and OpenGL ES offer a package that gets cutting-edge, animated, custom GUIs on the lowest cost hardware in the shortest time.

AMD showed off OpenCL-accelerated Havok gaming physics at the 2009 Game Developers Conference. Videos are available on the Havok.com website.

GarageGames has revealed that Torque 3D, the latest version of its popular Torque development environment, will feature the ability to publish games playable directly in web browsers. Torque 3D is a self-contained engine and development environment that offers more straightforward web publishing. The Basic version of Torque 3D will include new physics technology, a COLLADA-driven content pipeline, the new material editor and unified terrain system, and other feature debuts. Thanks largely to COLLADA, “Torque will basically work really easily with any of the major art tools that are popular in games,” GarageGames business development VP Brett Seyler promised.

The Khronos™ Group today announced an initiative to create an open, royalty-free standard for bringing accelerated 3D graphics to the Web. In response to a proposal from Mozilla, Khronos has created an ‘Accelerated 3D on Web’ working group that Mozilla has offered to chair. This royalty-free standard will be developed under the proven Khronos development process with a target of a first public release within 12 months. Any interested company is welcome to join Khronos to make contributions, stand for chair, influence the direction of the specification and gain early access to draft specifications before public release. The working group will consider various approaches including exposing OpenGL and OpenGL ES 2.0 capabilities within ECMAScript. The Khronos Accelerated 3D on Web working group will commence work during April 2009.

The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that it has publicly released the OpenSL ES™ 1.0 specification, a royalty-free, cross-platform C-language API for high-performance, low-latency audio functionality on mobile and embedded devices. The OpenSL ES standard simplifies deployment of hardware and software audio capabilities across any platform or operating system and provides broad audio portability for application developers. The specifications are immediately available for download and may be used royalty-free by implementers and developers. An Adopters Program for OpenSL ES including extensive conformance tests to ensure cross-implementation consistency and trademark usage by conformant implementations will be released by Khronos during April 2009.

The Khronos™ Group announced it has publicly released the OpenGL® 3.1 specification that modernizes and streamlines the cross-platform, royalty-free API for 3D graphics. OpenGL 3.1 includes GLSL™ 1.40, a new version of the OpenGL shading language, and provides enhanced access to the latest generation of programmable graphics hardware through improved programmability, more efficient vertex processing, expanded texturing functionality and increased buffer management flexibility. OpenGL 3.1 implementations are expected shortly from multiple vendors. The new OpenGL 3.1 specification and more details are available here. The official OpenGL 3.1 feedback thread is available here.

Luxology® LLC announced a new customized COLLADA plug-in for the soon to be announced modo® 401. Introducing a host of new features for exporting from modo and a totally new COLLADA importer, modo 401 users will be able to easily preserve key attributes of their modo creations for file export and round-trip manipulation even in complex 3D pipelines. Luxology will be demonstrating its new COLLADA plug-in at the GDC 2009 Chalk Talk session at the Intel Visual Adrenaline Lounge from 1:30 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 26.

Khronos is proud to announce the follow highlights in the upcoming Developers Sessions at GDC on March 24th 2009:

Streamlined OpenGL 3.1 Specification Released
Just nine months after OpenGL 3.0; Adds cutting-edge GPU functionality

OpenCL 1.0 Implementations Close to Shipping
Portable heterogeneous parallel computing; Seamless interop visual computing with OpenGL

OpenSL ES 1.0 Released for Cross-Platform Audio Processing
Extensive portable audio functionality; Enhances audio in the Khronos Mobile API Ecosystem

Khronos Launches Initiative for Accelerated 3D on the Web
Open call for industry participation and contributions; Project initiated by Mozilla

A new version of BlenderPocket 2.48a is now available. BlenderPocket is a port of the famous Open Source 3D creation solution Blender dedicated for mobile devices having a touch screen, small amount of memory (RAM), a low speed processor (with no floating point unit) and no graphic unit (no hardware acceleration). It uses OpenGL ES (Rasteroid Implementation not available any more) and is working today on all mobile devices with Windows Mobile 2003 or newer. BlenderPocket has all essential features of Blender including Modeling, Texturing, UV Unwrapping, Animation, Rigging, Nodes, Lightning and Rendering.

The Khronos Group has announced a detailed schedule of the upcoming Developers University session at this years Game Developers Conference 2009. This all day session will teach you about cross-platform APIs for advanced graphics and media acceleration. The Khronos Session will cover four major topics, OpenCL, OpenGL, COLLADA and the Khronos Mobile API Ecosystem:

• OpenGL 3.1 - a streamlining of the OpenGL API that also adds cutting edge acceleration functionality
• OpenCL 1.0 - portable heterogenous parallel computing that works smoothly with OpenGL to open a new world of visual computing opportunities
• OpenSL ES 1.0 - an API for enhanced mobile audio that forms the final piece of the Khronos mobile ecosystem
• Accelerated 3D for the Web - a new initiative spearheaded by Mozilla with Khronos to bring dynamic 3D graphics to web content everywhere.

Additionally, the guest speakers have also been listed. Included in the roster are NVIDIA, Jon Peddie Research, AMD, EA, Blizzard, Transgaming, Graphic Remedy, Biodroid, XS, IBM, ST Ericsson and ARM.

Graphic Remedy will launch the first official version of gDEBugger Mac at this year’s Game Developers Conference, San Francisco, 23-27 March. On Tuesday March 24, gDEBugger Mac will be demonstrated, all day long, in the Khronos Developer University full-day tutorial area. Fully functional trial version of gDEBugger Mac is now available for download. gDEBugger is an OpenGL Debugger and Profiler. It traces application activity on top of the OpenGL API, lets programmers see what is happening within the graphic system implementation to find bugs and optimize OpenGL application performance. gDEBugger Mac brings all of gDEBugger’s Debugging and Profiling abilities to the OpenGL Mac OS X developer’s world. gDEBugger now runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems.

Imagination Technologies announces further details of the first POWERVR SGX graphics IP core with multi-processor (MP) core support. The technology, henceforth POWERVR SGX543MP, is being delivered to customers in SGXMP2 (two-core) to SGXMP16 (16-core) variants. The cores support Khronos APIs including OpenGL™ ES 2.x, OpenVG™ 1.x and OpenCL™. With the POWERVR SGX543MP family Imagination continues to extend its leadership of the embedded graphics acceleration market with blistering POWERVR solutions which address the rapidly growing demands for high performance graphics in a wide range of consumer electronics segments. Imagination’s graphics IP cores now range from SGX520, the world’s smallest OpenGL™ ES 2.0 mobile core, to SGX543MP16 for high-performance console and computing devices. Some of the innovative technology behind POWERVR SGX543MP is being revealed in a keynote presentation at the 4th annual Multicore Expo.

Khronos has made available the six slide sets from the Multicore Expo 2009 conference in PDF format. All of the slides are available in the Khronos Group Developers Library.

• OpenCL and Mobile Graphics and Media
• Khronos APIs for Automotive Applications
• Khronos Mobile Graphics and Media Ecosystem
• OpenCL as an intermediate language for heterogeneous multi-core programming
• OpenCL the open standard for heterogeneous parallel programming
• An introduction to OpenGL ES

Khronos Group has announced the availability of an OpenCL Quick Reference card in PDF format. This comprehensive 6 page quick reference covers all important aspects of the OpenCL API. You can download your copy of the OpenCL Quick Reference Card today. If you are attending the Game Developers conference this year, Khronos will be handing out a nicely printed version of this reference guide.

HyperShot is an all new generation software renderer that allows anyone within minutes to create photographic realism with their model. Think of it like a new type of camera, an all software camera. Import all the popular model formats, drag and drop accurate materials, choose your environment and you have a photo of your digital model. HyperShot supports COLLADA on both Windows and Mac OS X platforms.