Khronos Group

The Khronos Group, Inc.

Motto	Open standards for graphics, media and parallel computation
Formation	2000 (2000)
Type	Consortium
Purpose	Creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of graphics, rich media and parallel computation on a wide variety of platforms and devices
Headquarters	Beaverton, Oregon, US
Coordinates	45°30′30″N 122°50′03″W / 45.508407°N 122.834305°W / 45.508407; -122.834305
President	Neil Trevett
Website	www.khronos.org

The Khronos Group, Inc. is an American non-profit member-funded industry consortium based in Beaverton, Oregon, focused on the creation of open standard, royalty-free application programming interfaces (APIs) for authoring and accelerated playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos members may contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, vote at various stages before public deployment, and accelerate delivery of their platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

On July 31, 2006, it was announced at SIGGRAPH that control of the OpenGL specification would be passed to the group.^[1][2]

History

The Khronos Group was founded in 2000 by companies including ATI Technologies, Discreet, Evans & Sutherland, Intel Corporation, NVIDIA, Silicon Graphics (SGI), and Sun Microsystems. It now has roughly 120 member companies, over 30 adopters, and 24 conforming members.^[3] Its president is Neil Trevett.

Working groups

• COLLADA, a file-format intended to facilitate interchange of 3D assets
• EGL, an interface between Khronos rendering APIs such as OpenGL ES or OpenVG and the underlying native platform window system^[4]
• glTF, a file format specification for 3D scenes and models^[5]
• OpenCL, a cross-platform computation API.^[6]
• OpenGL, a cross-platform computer graphics API
• OpenGL ES, a derivative of OpenGL for use on mobile and embedded systems, such as cell phones, portable gaming devices, and more
• OpenGL SC, a safety critical profile of OpenGL ES designed to meet the needs of the safety-critical market
• OpenKCam, Advanced Camera Control API
• OpenKODE, an API for providing abstracted, portable access to operating system resources such as file systems, networks and math libraries
• OpenMAX, a layered set of three programming interfaces of various abstraction levels, providing access to multimedia functionality
• OpenML, an API for capturing, transporting, processing, displaying, and synchronizing digital media
• OpenSL ES, an audio API tuned for embedded systems, standardizing access to features such as 3D positional audio and MIDI playback
• OpenVG, an API for accelerating processing of 2D vector graphics
• OpenVX, Hardware acceleration API for Computer Vision applications and libraries
• OpenWF, APIs for 2D graphics composition and display control
• OpenXR, an open and royalty-free standard for virtual reality and augmented reality applications and devices
• SPIR, an intermediate compiler target for OpenCL and Vulkan
• StreamInput, an API for consistently handling input devices
• SYCL, a single-source C++ DSEL for heterogeneous computing
• Vulkan, a low-overhead computer graphics API
• WebCL, a JavaScript binding to OpenCL within a browser
• WebGL, a JavaScript binding to OpenGL ES within a browser on any platform supporting the OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics standards

Members

Khronos Group divides its members followingly:^[7]

• Promoter - have full working group participation and voting rights plus the right to designate a Director to the Khronos Board.
• Contributor - have full working group participation and voting rights.
• Associate - have full working group participation but without working group voting rights.
• Academic - have full working group participation but without working group voting rights.

Current members (as of 11 November  2016) are (highlights):

References

External links

• Official website
• Pulli, Kari. "New APIs for Mobile Graphics" (PDF).