Overview of the Khronos Group

Randi Rost -- Intel Corporation

The Khronos Group is a large and extremely successful standards organization whose mission is to define the APIs and technology required to support the authoring and playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Over the past several years, this organization has focused primarily on sorting out the issues to support developers in the wild and wooly mobile media market.

This presentation describes the organization of the Khronos Group, the current set of working groups, how the technologies fit together to create a cohesive platform for development and deployment, and how your organization can use these technologies and become involved in the effort.

Presentation Slides

 

Khronos Overview (.PDF, 4.58 MB)

OpenKODE Structure (.PDF, 245 KB)

OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0 and EGL

Lars Bishop -- NVIDIA

With the growing popularity of 3D content on handheld and embedded platforms and the recent availability of powerful 3D hardware on these devices, developers required a flexible and powerful 3D rendering API that was designed for the unique nature of handheld platforms.  Because no existing API was directly applicable, the Khronos Group created OpenGL ES.  OpenGL ES provided an immediately recognizable architecture (i.e. based on OpenGL), pared down (and in some dimensions extended) to match the needs of both the hardware platforms and content developers.

This presentation will first discuss OpenGL ES version 1.1, contrasting it with “desktop” OpenGL 1.X.  This includes not only discussing the differences in the APIs themselves, but also some of the reasoning behind these OpenGL / OpenGL ES differences.  By discussing the reasoning behind these differences, the presentation seeks to explain some of the unique challenges inherent in current handheld platforms (as compared to desktop systems). The subsequent version of OpenGL ES (2.0) eliminates the fixed functionality of OpenGL ES 1.1 and replaces it with programmability controlled through the OpenGL Shading Language. A surface definition API called EGL will also be briefly discussed. EGL provides mechansims for creating and utilizing drawing surfaces for all of the relevant Khronos APIs..

Presentation Slides

 

GL ES and EGL (.PDF, 529 KB)

Specification Documents

 

OpenGL ES 1.1 Specification (.PDF, 392 KB)

OpenGL ES 1.1 Extension Pack Specification (.PDF, 392 KB)

OpenGL ES 2.0 Specfication (.PDF, 382 KB)

EGL Reference Pages (HTML)

Header Files

 

gl.h for GL ES 1.1 (.h file, 37 KB)

gl.h for GL ES 2.0 (.h file, 36 KB)

egl.h (.h file, 9 KB)

OpenGL ES 2.0 Programmable Pipeline

Robert Simpson -- ATI Research

Programmable graphics technology is coming to handheld device much more quickly than it came to desktop devices. With this technology comes the need for an API to expose the programmable functionality contained in the device. OpenGL ES and the OpenGL Shading Language were the logical starting points, but both required some changes to meet the needs of the mobile media market. Rather than support fixed function and programmability (as done in standard OpenGL 2.0), OpenGL ES has decided to do away with fixed functionality entirely, and do everything using programmability. This talk describes the key decisions made going from OpenGL ES 1.1 to OpenGL ES 2.0, as well as the key decisions made going from the OpenGL Shading Language in OpenGL 2.0 to the ES version of the language

Presentation Slides

 

GL ES Programmable (.PDF, 714 KB)

Specification Documents

 

OpenGL ES Language Specification ( PDF, 534 KB)

OpenGL ES Safety Critical

Chris Hall -- Seaweed Software

In certain market segments, government organizations have established certification requirements  for both hardware and software components. These certification requirements force limits on software complexity and contain regulations that dictate each phase of the software lifecycle. To support interactive 3D graphics in these safety critical markets, a reduced footprint version of OpenGL has been defined: OpenGL ES-SC.  This presentation covers the need for a safety critical OpenGL profile, discusses the decisions made to create this profile, and discusses the functionality it contains from a developer’s point of view.

Presentation Slides

 

GL ES Safety Critical (.PDF, 131 KB)

Specification Documents

 

OpenGL ES SC 1.0 Specification (.PDF, 392 KB)

OpenGL ES SC Philosophy (.PDF, 51 KB)

Header Files

 

es_sc_gl.h for GL ES SC 1.0 ( .h file,26 KB)

OpenVG

Dan Rice -- Sun

Many applications are based on rendering 2D vector graphics primitives such as Bezier curves. Yet, for desktop systems, 2D vector graphics have traditionally been rendered by the CPU rather than by the graphics accelerator. This approach is not effective on low-powered CPUs for mobile devices. To enable hardware accelerated vector graphics, the Khronos Group has defined an API call OpenVG. This API supports application development for portable mapping and GPS applications, e-book readers, and other applications that rely heavily on scalable vector graphics. OpenVG can be used to implement higher level vector graphics formats such as Flash, SVG, PDF, PostScript, vector fonts, and the like. This presentation provides a look at the API, the rendering pipeline, and the primitives that are supported in OpenVG.

Presentation Slides

 

OpenVG (.PDF, 2.02 MB)

Specification Documents

 

OpenVG 1.0 (.PDF, 1.52 MB)

Header Files

 

openvg.h ( .h file, 26 KB)

vgu.h ( .h file, 4 KB)

OpenMAX

Brian Murray --Freescale

This talk will cover the three layers of the OpenMAX API, which enable streamed multimedia application and codec portability across OS and hardware platforms.  An overview of the Application Layer, the Integration Layer, and the Development Layer APIs within the standard will be covered as well as examples of usage and interoperation.  Audience members should leave with a clear understanding of the OpenMAX APIs and how they relate to enabling multimedia capabilities on mobile devices.

Presentation Slides

 

OpenMAX (.PDF, 456 KB)

Specification Documents

 

OpenMAX DL 1.0 (.PDF,1.35 MB)

OpenMAX IL 1.0 (.PDF, 1.69 MB)

COLLADA

Mark Barnes --Sony Computer Entertainment America

COLLADA is a digital asset exchange schema that helps developers be more productive. It enables 3D authoring tools to work together to raise the power of the tool chains. It also defines a packaging format for content delivery, including shaders, animation, and physics. COLLADA enables leading 3D authoring tools to work effectively together to create OpenGL ES applications and assets. This presentation describes COLLADA: what it is, how it works, and who is supporting it.

Presentation Slides

 

COLLADA (.PDF, 719 KB)

Specification Documents

 

COLLADA Schema 1.4 (.XSD,376 KB)

 

Developer Perspectives

Timo Suoranta --Futuremark

OpenKODE sounds great on paper, but can real live developers actually use it? Will it solve portability problems? Will it make a developer’s life easier or more complicated? This course concludes with a discussion of portability and performance issues by a developer that is actively using the technologies that have been described previously. Conclusions are drawn about the current OpenKODE environment as well as the environment that is coming in the not-too-distant future.

Presentation Slides

 

Developer Perspectives (.PDF, 719 KB)