Come to the SYCL @ CGO Tutorial on the afternoon of Saturday, February the 7th 2015 (2/7/2015); as part of The 2015 International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO) at the San Francisco Airport Marriott Waterfront Hotel. This tutorial will include “An introduction to SYCL for OpenCL” (with Lee Howes, Qualcomm); “triSYCL: experiments around SYCL with an open-source implementation” (with Ronan Keryell, AMD); and “Working with SYCL on OpenCL devices” (with Ruyman Reyes, Codeplay). Sign up for the SYCL @ CGO Tutorial in addition to registration for the CGO Conference; or as a standalone workshop/tutorial-only registration. Please note that early bird registration must be completed by Jan 11, 2015.

This top-view panel features John Gaeta (Lucasfilm), David Traub (Epiphany Film Fund), Neil Trevett (President Khronos Group), and Professor Michael Page, OCADU. If you are fans of The Matrix or the Lawnmower Man - this is a must-see panel. More to come here and here.

An open source two-day lecture course for teaching and learning OpenCL has now been downloaded over 3000 times. This KITE initiative carried out by Simon McIntosh-Smith and Tom Deakin from the University of Bristol in the UK is expecting a small update in the new year, when some more advanced material on code optimisation will be added. Simon said “I would have expected hundreds, and anything over 1,000 would have been awesome. But 3,000!!! I am stunned.”

KDAB are rewriting the Qt3D module of Qt 5 to provide an easy but flexible API for easily getting 3D content into your Qt applications using either C++ or QML. Qt3D is built on top of OpenGL and OpenGL ES and provides a data-driven renderer configuration. The first of a series of blog articles introducing Qt3D 2.0 is now available.

The PowerVR Graphics SDK was previously only available through Imagination’s PowerVR Insider website. You may now find the Native SDK (cross-platform OpenGL ES 1.x/2.0/3.x SDK), WebGL SDK and PVRMonitor (on-device hardware profiling tool for Android) on Github.

Cesium uses the web-friendly glTF format for 3D models. Cesium provides an online COLLADA-to-glTF converter that allows us to drag and drop a COLLADA model and its textures to produce a glTF model for use in Cesium. This blog post is a series of tips for authoring 3D models and then exporting them to COLLADA to get the best performance and robustness.

Altera Corporation released its Quartus II software v14.1 featuring expanded support for Arria 10 FPGAs and SoCs, the FPGA industry’s only devices with hardened floating point DSP blocks and the industry’s only 20 nm SoC FPGAs that integrate ARM processors. Altera’s latest software release provides immediate support for the hardened floating point DSP blocks integrated in Arria 10 FPGAs and SoCs. Users can choose between three unique DSP design entry flows and achieve up to an industry-leading 1.5 TFLOPS of DSP performance. These design flows include OpenCL for software programmers, DSP Builder for model-based designers and hardware description language (HDL) flows for traditional FPGA designers.

The winner of Khronos’ Fall 2014 WebGL Widget Contest is the team of William Casola and Marco Tarini, with their interactive Spinnable World Map. They won a WebGL book from Packt Publishing, two WebGL books from O’Reilly, and an NVidia Shield Gaming Tablet. Congratulations! Honorable mention goes to the Orbiting Spheres entry from Tarek Sherif.

Go is an open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software and has just hit v1.4. The OpenGL ES bindings are deliberately minimal, staying as close the C API as possible. The semantics of each function maps onto functions described in the Khronos documentation. One notable departure from the C API is the introduction of types to represent common uses of GLint: Texture, Surface, Buffer, etc.

PlayCanvas announces Physically Based Rendering is now available via WebGL. Over the past 3 years since PlayCanvas started, WebGL adoption has skyrocketed. WebGL now supported in every major browser, both on mobile and the desktop. Current statistics show that 82.7% of web users have the ability to run WebGL content, and this number continues to rise. The PlayCanvas ‘Star-Lord Demo’ shows that WebGL is perfectly capable of implementing PBR and other high-end graphical features.

Offering OpenCL 2.0 support, and engineered to unlock new capabilities in AMD APUs and AMD Radeon GPUs based on GCN architecture, AMD Catalyst Omega special edition driver delivers enhanced capabilities, additional performance, and greater reliability. AMD has also made available a beta version of their APP SDK 3.0 which contains a complete set of sample code illustrating how to utilize each of the major new features of OpenCL 2.0.

This Wikipedia visualization was created by French computer science student Owen Cornec. Each “star” in WikiGalaxy is a single article on Wikipedia. Highly related articles are placed close to each other in space with connections between them. While this is a Chrome experiment running WebGL and HTML5, WikiGalaxy should work in most modern browsers.

CL3VER has joined the AWS Partner Network (APN) as a Technology Partner. This move is a demonstration that browser based interactive 3D Visualization based on WebGL and dedicated to professionals Architects and Manufacturers can be successfully provided via cloud. Leading architecture companies Gensler and NBBJ and the industrial robots manufacturer Yaskawa Motoman have quoted the news confirming the scalability and reliability of the CL3VER platform for professional use. “We see CL3VER as a great compliment to a designer’s toolset and a potential game changer in Design Collaboration.” said Jorge Barrero, Senior Associate at Gensler.

Altera Corporation announced Electronics Weekly magazine selected the Altera SDK for OpenCL as its design tool of the year at the annual Elektra European Electronics Industry Awards gala in London. These accolades represent the latest in a series of awards and recognitions the Altera SDK for OpenCL has received since its release in 2012. Today, Altera offers the industry’s only OpenCL-conformant solution that allows software programmers to easily implement OpenCL applications on FPGA accelerators.

Microsoft has teamed up with NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) to track the progress of Santa on Christmas Eve. Be sure to load up the Santa Tracker on Christmas eve with your favourite WebGL enabled browser! For a third year in a row the Santa tracker is using CesiumJS and WebGL for the build.