Khronos Group

Khronos Group
Motto	Open standards for graphics, media and parallel computation
Formation	2000
Type	Consortium
Purpose/focus	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, USA
Location	15500 SW Jay Street #45043, Beaverton, Oregon 97006 USA
Coordinates	45.508407,-122.834305
Region served	Worldwide
President	Neil Trevett
Website	www.khronos.org

The Khronos Group is a not-for-profit member-funded industry consortium based in Beaverton, Oregon, focused on the creation of open standard, royalty-free APIs to enable the authoring and accelerated playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge 3D platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

On the 31st July, 2006 it was announced at SIGGRAPH that control of the OpenGL specification would be passed to the group.

An article at SPIE Electronic Imaging 2006 Multimedia on Mobile Devices gives an overview of many mobile APIs, mostly from Khronos.

History

The Khronos Group was founded in 2000 by a number of media centric companies, including ATI Technologies, Discreet, Evans & Sutherland, Intel Corporation, NVIDIA, Silicon Graphics (SGI), and Sun Microsystems. Today the Khronos Group has roughly 100 member companies, over 30 adopters, and twenty-four conforming members. Neil Trevett is currently the President of the Khronos Group.

Working Groups

• OpenGL, a cross-platform computer graphics API
• OpenCL, a cross-platform computation API.
• COLLADA, a file-format intended to facilitate interchange of 3D assets.
• OpenGL SC, a safety critical profile of OpenGL ES designed to meet the needs of the safety-critical market
• OpenKODE, an API for providing abstracted, portable access to operating system resources such as file systems, networks and math libraries
• OpenGL ES, a derivative of OpenGL for use on mobile and embedded systems, such as cell phones, portable gaming devices, and more
• OpenVG, an API for accelerating processing of 2D vector graphics .
• OpenMAX, a layered set of three programming interfaces of various abstraction levels, providing access to multimedia functionality
• OpenSL ES, an audio API tuned for embedded systems, standardizing access to features such as 3D positional audio and MIDI playback
• EGL, an interface between Khronos rendering APIs such as OpenGL ES or OpenVG and the underlying native platform window system
• OpenWF, APIs for 2D graphics composition and display control
• OpenML, an API for capturing, transporting, processing, displaying, and synchronizing digital media
• WebGL, a JavaScript binding to OpenGL ES within a browser on any platform supporting the OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics standards
• WebCL, a JavaScript binding to OpenCL within a browser.
• StreamInput, an API for consistently handling input devices.

Members of Khronos Group

In 2006, some of the OpenGL ARB Working Group members were:

• AMD/ATI
• Apple Inc.
• ARM Holdings
• Creative Labs
• id Software
• Ericsson
• Google
• Intel Corporation
• Motorola
• Mozilla
• Nokia
• Nvidia
• Samsung Electronics
• Sony Computer Entertainment
• Oracle/Sun Microsystems
• Texas Instruments

For a complete and updated list of the project's members see the promoters, contributors and academics member list of the Khronos Group.

External links

• Official website