Starting today, Sketchfab is proud to announce their support of the glTF file format. Zip up your glTF file along with any accompanying assets and then drag and drop into a browser window at Sketchfab.com. This method allows you to upload glTF files no matter which 3D software package you used to create the file. The addition of glTF means we now support over 30 file formats! In addition, the Sketchfab revised Unity exporter plugin will leverage the glTF format behind-the-scene to transmit 3D files in the most efficient, accurate way possible. If you’re interested in downloading example files visit the Sketchfab glTF page.

Basemark has launched the VRTrek Library, enables the VR industry to analyze and provide a better user experience for end users. VRTrek Library is aimed for VR HMD vendors and software developers to measure the latency of an HMD when running various applications. Latency is one of the biggest challenges in the Virtual Reality (VR) industry. While wearing a VR Head Mounted Display (HMD), people notice even the smallest of delays between what’s displayed at the screen and what the brain expects.

FotoNation Limited and VeriSilicon Holdings Co., Ltd have entered into an agreement to jointly develop a next generation image processing platform that offers best-in-class programmability, power, performance and area for computer vision (CV), computational imaging (CI) and deep learning. The market-ready IP platform, named IPU 2.0, will be available for customer license and design in the first quarter of 2017. IPU 2.0 offers a unified programing environment and pre-integrated imaging features for a wide range of applications across surveillance, automotive, mobile, IoT and more. IPU 2.0 will use open initiatives such as OpenVX and OpenCL.

Web3D 2017 will be held in Brisbane Australia June 5-7 at Queensland University of Technology. The Call for submissions is now open with a dead line set for February 13th. With WebGL now widely supported by default in modern browsers, tools such as X3D, X3DOM, Cobweb, three.js, glTF, and A-Frame VR are allowing nearly anyone to create Web3D content. Submissions being accepted now for Papers, Posters, Workshops, Tutorials and the Art Gallery.

Shaderific version 4.1 is now available. Shaderific is an educational app for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch that makes it possible to write, compile and test OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenGL ES 3.0 shader programs directly on any iOS device. Version 4.1 adds full support for iOS 10. Furthermore, the release includes a new shader for Conway’s Game of Life that demonstrates the use of the newly introduced custom uniforms. The cell size can be determinded and shadow effects can be enabled to provide a variety of beautiful rendering options. To provide full flexibilty to the user Shaderifc now supports importing Game of Life patterns in the form of text files. The patterns are automatically converted to textures that can be used as start configurations.

HoloJS is a framework for creating UWP applications using JavaScript and WebGL. HoloJS is a C++ library that hosts Chakra to run JavaScript code, and also hosts ANGLE to handle OpenGL ES graphics calls.

Radeon Pro Software Crimson ReLive Edition includes open-source tools that redefine visual and audio quality. Radeon Loom software overcomes formidable technology challenges with the processing-intensive video stitching process that is vital to creating cinematic 360-degree video experiences in VR. Built upon the Khronos OpenVX computer vision framework as implemented by AMD, the professional-grade Radeon Loom software stitches output from up to 24 cameras live in real-time and up to 31 cameras offline.

Imagination Technologies announces that a PowerVR GPU is the first to achieve Khronos OpenVX 1.1 conformance. With OpenVX, developers can run fully optimized vision algorithms on the highly parallel, power-efficient PowerVR GPUs that are at the heart of many of the world’s mobile, automotive and embedded devices. Frank Brill, chairman of the Khronos OpenVX working group, says: “The momentum we are seeing with OpenVX is strong and growing, with conformant OpenVX 1.0 implementations and tools shipping from numerous vendors. We congratulate Imagination on being the first adopter member to achieve OpenVX 1.1 conformance, enabling developers creating applications on Imagination’s popular PowerVR GPUs to take advantage of OpenVX 1.1’s expanded range of processing functions and enhanced flexibility.” View all products that are in conformance with OpenVX or learn more about becoming an OpenVX adopter.

Khronos made videos of three presentations from Codeplay at the Khronos Booth. The videos cover “Heterogeneous C++ dispatch: Comparing SYCL to HPX, KoKKos, & Raja, “Khronos SYCL Parallel STL Open-source Project” and “Getting Your Hands on SYCL Using the ComputeCpp Community Edition”

Khronos issued a Request For Quote (RFQ) back in September 2016 to enhance and expand the existing OpenCL 2.1 conformance tests to create an OpenCL 2.2 test suite to be used to define conformance for OpenCL 2.2 implementations. The contract has been awarded to StreamComputing. StreamComputing is a software consultancy company specialized in performance tuned software development for CPU, GPU and FPGA. A large part of their clients hires them for their OpenCL expertise.

Unity 5.6 beta uses Vulkan to take the graphics performance to the next level, and at final release, Vulkan will run on Android, Windows, Linux, and Tizen. Unity has seen a rendering performance improvement out-of-the box up to 60% using Unity – that is without having to deal with any specifics of the Vulkan API.

Amazon recently announced a developer preview of their new F1 instance. Equipped with Intel Broadwell E5 2686 v4 processors (2.3 GHz base speed, 2.7 GHz Turbo mode on all cores, and 3.0 GHz Turbo mode on one core), up to 976 GB of memory, up to 4 TB of NVMe SSD storage, and one to eight FPGAs, the F1 instances provide you with plenty of resources to complement your core, FPGA-based logic. The specs on the Xilinx FPGA are: Xilinx UltraScale+ VU9P fabricated using a 16 nm process; 64 GiB of ECC-protected memory on a 288-bit wide bus (four DDR4 channels); Dedicated PCIe x16 interface to the CPU; Approximately 2.5 million logic elements; Approximately 6,800 Digital Signal Processing (DSP) engines; Virtual JTAG interface for debugging.

Croteam has also released an update to The Talos Principle that includes improvements to its Vulkan renderer that was previously available as beta.

Kent Bye with Voices of VR podcast had a chance to chat with Khronos Group President Neil Trevett to talk about the call for participation to the Khronos Group VR Standards Initiative.

In the high-level test, the Adreno 540 GPU scored 41.4 fps (Offscreen) in Manhattan 3.1 OpenGL ES 3.1, 61.8 fps (Offscreen) in Manhattan OpenGL ES 3.0, and 114.9 fps (Offscreen) in T-Tex OpenGL ES 2.0. The scores suggest the new Adreno 540 GPU is around 30% more powerful than the Adreno 530 GPU inside the Qualcomm Snapdragon 821.