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The Khronos Group announces expanded membership opportunities. The Khronos Board of Directors has approved the addition of a nonprofit membership tier and an expansion of the associate-level membership, to reduce membership fees for smaller companies, to encourage wider participation from every industry served by the consortium. The Associate-level membership has been expanded to reduce membership fees for companies that have up to 100 employees. The annual pricing model is $175 per company employee with a minimum starting fee of $3,500 per year - scaling the annual dues based on the size of the member organization. The new nonprofit membership tier is available to registered nonprofit organizations at $7,500 per year. Learn more about The Khronos Group membership levels and how to join.

Immersed is the East Coast's leading event for professionals that work with or benefit from technologies like virtual reality, mixed reality, augmented reality, and stereoscopic 3D. Our primary audiences include potential enterprise clients, fellow professionals working in the space, and media. Consumers are also reached through a separate element of the show. We are actively seeking speakers and exhibitors that are well versed in the use of immersive technology in entertainment, manufacturing, healthcare, marketing, and education. Learn more about our call for speakers and the Khronos Standards line-up.

Everest Panorama has become the first WebGL project ever to win a prestigious Red Dot Design Award. Red Dot Design Award dates back to the year 1955. It is granted by the European institution Design Zentrum for outstanding achievements in the field of industrial design. The best works are showcased in the Red Dot Museum in Essen, Germany. The Everest Panorama project is a unique fusion of modern web technologies that seamlessly blends multimedia features with 3D environment, Yandex.Maps (a Google Maps equivalent) and panoramic pictures. It tells a story of an exhausting, yet fascinating journey of a group of mountain climbers to the summit of Mount Everest.

Neil Trevett, President of The Khronos Group, talks to Architosh in this two-part series about OpenGL and the future of graphics standards. On the eve of SIGGRAPH 2017 Neil Trevett spoke to Architosh about the evolving OpenGL standard as well as directions the group is taking to plot a path for a universal graphics API that engages the use of low-level APIs. Read more about why OpenGL isn't packing for retirement just yet a the key thing in OpenGL 4.6 is SPIR-V is part of core.

Initial Vulkan SDL support allows the Simple DirectMedia Library commonly used by games to manage Vulkan surface creation across Android / Linux / Windows in a uniform manner. These are convenient Vulkan helpers for those using SDL and will not make your existing SDL OpenGL application suddenly support Vulkan. This initial Vulkan SDL support was done by Jacob Lifshay and Khronos member Mark Callow. (Source: Phoronix)

Virtual Reality is becoming increasingly commercially viable, just as augmented reality is also gaining popularity. But as with any gold rush, developers and vendors are feverishly working to stake their claim on a new frontier while still partially mining in the dark, as both VR and AR still have a long way to go before reaching maturity. Now is the time to standardize VR functionality which will help decrease porting costs for developers, reduce uncertainty for consumers and create the core VR/AR platform standards that can be expanded over time. Read the VentureBeat article and learn how OpenXR fits into all this.

The open source C++11/C++14 and OpenGL graphics engine Magnum recently added first-class WebAssembly support. An article on the official blog explains how to easily compile your C++ projects to WebAssembly, compares it to asm.js and mentions a few useful tips for best online experience. Last but not least, there's a bunch of online demos that use both WebGL 1 and 2, showing how a single codebase can be run both natively and in the browser.

Mazatech released version 4.5 of AmanithVG SDK on GitHub (http://github.com/Mazatech/amanithvg-sdk), a C/C++ library that implements OpenVG 1.1 specifications from Khronos Group. AmanithVG SDK is features-unlimited and it is free for evaluation purposes. It supports desktop, mobile and embedded platforms: Windows (x86, x86_64), Mac OSX (ub), Linux (arm, arm-v6hf, arm-v7a, aarch64, mipsel, mips64el, pppc64el, x86, x86_64), Android (arm, arm-v7a, arm64-v8a, mips, mips64, x86, x86_64), iOS (ub), QNX (armv7-le, x86). The package also includes a set of ten tutorials covering different OpenVG features: gradients paint types, patterns, stroking, alpha blending, images, masking and text, completed with source code and detailed description on the AmanithVG website. The building system is based on CMake, so all the tutorials support Visual Studio, XCode, Android Studio as well as plain Makefile.

The Khronos Group is proud to announce that Owli has joined as an Associate Member.

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Sundog Software released version 5.0 of the SilverLining Sky, 3D Cloud, and Weather SDK, featuring support for OpenGL 2.0 through 4.5. SilverLining is a C++ library that simulates real-time skies for any given time, location, and weather conditions. It implements a variety of volumetric rendering techniques to represent many different 3D cloud types in a physically realistic manner from any angle, while maintaining high frame-rates. SilverLining 5 introduces new hand-modeled storm clouds suitable for use in flight simulators. Large, natural-looking cumulonimbus thunderheads and towering cumulus clouds in various stages of development are included. SilverLining integrates into any OpenGL application easily with simple calls to initialize, update, and draw its skies, clouds, and precipitation effects. Integration code for OpenSceneGraph is included. SilverLining is widely used in the training and simulation industry, and powers the popular "SkyMaxx Pro" add-on for the X-Plane flight simulator.

In early August the Khronos team was at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles, where we celebrated OpenGL’s 25th anniversary at the BOF Blitz Party. We also announced a new website, as well as OpenGL 4.6, a growing glTF ecosystem, and the Vulkan Portability Initiative. Learn more about BOF Blitz.

Visualization is a great tool for understanding large amounts of data, but transferring the data from an HPC system or from the cloud to a local workstation for analysis can be a painful experience. Analyzing and visualizing data right where it is generated and using server-side rendering lets you deliver high quality visual content to any client hardware. Whether it’s a DGX station or a smartphone. With the arrival of EGL, taking advantage of OpenGL on a headless server has become even simpler, making it unnecessary to run an X server or any other tools. Slight modifications to your OpenGL context management code using EGL functions is required as described in this post. Using EGL also requires you to link your application to different libraries. This post from NVIDIA is about how to correctly link a modern OpenGL application.

Looking for complete set of C++11 classes to wrap OpenGL 4.6 that relies on modern Direct State Access (DSA) usage? Try Ali Can Demiralp’s wrapper on github.com based on GLEW 2.1. Also supports CUDA interoperation and GLM for OpenGL Mathematics.

Google has merged Earth Pro with the free Google Earth, now offering only Goole Earth Pro. Another notable change: In the past you had the option to switch between DirectX or OpenGL when running Google Earth on Windows, now the application defaults to OpenGL mode. Learn about the other improvements.

Antilatency develops 6DoF positional tracking for AR/VR. The team believes that mobile VR should be mobile and want to give mobile headset owners the feeling of full immersion. ALT: Antilatency tracker, the main product of the company, makes these things possible.