Now over 100 companies working together in the Khronos Group on industry-wide APIs for portable, high-performance games and rich media applications
22nd March, 2006 — Game Developer Conference (GDC), San Jose, California — The Khronos Group is pleased to announce that Intel has joined the Khronos Group as a Promoting member and will also hold a seat on the Board of Directors to further advance the evolution of open standards that enable the authoring and acceleration of games and media on a wide variety of platforms and devices, such as mobile phones. Also announced in other Khronos news today, new members Emdigo, Feeling Software, Monotype Imaging, RadVision, Reigncomm, Scaleform, Softimage and TAT bring the total number of companies participating in the Khronos Group to over one hundred. Khronos is an open, member-funded consortium committed to developing royalty-free standards for mobile and embedded markets, including the new OpenKODE initiative to create a coherent development and deployment platform to enable portable, high-performance games and media applications for mobile handsets. Khronos has extensive membership from all aspects of the mobile industry including carriers, handset OEMs, middleware vendors, games developers and CPU and graphics silicon providers. Further details about joining Khronos for any interested company may be found at: http://www.khronos.org/members/.
“Khronos has been at the forefront of creating enabling standards for the mobile industry for many years, and it is good to see even more industry heavyweights such as Intel join the group to ensure this important work continues to gain momentum,” said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of the Tiburon CA based market research firm, Jon Peddie Research.
“We welcome Intel and all our new members, as our extensive open membership ensures that we have the industry representation to ensure our standards genuinely meet the industry’s needs,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. “We invite members of the press and interested developers to come by the Khronos Booth #1632 at Game Developer conference to see dozens of demos of the latest technologies developed by the Khronos Group.”
“Khronos is more than just an open standards group; it is a catalyst for the development of graphically advanced and compelling mobile gaming content and technology,” said David McBrien, VP business development, Imagination Technologies. “Our tenure as a Khronos promoting member and working closely with our partners also in the Khronos Group has proven to be a very valuable experience for Imagination Technologies. We encourage participation in the group by new members, and we are committed to the continuing development of the Khronos Group family of open standards under the OpenKODE platform.”
Advanced media applications, including 3D games, are driving enhanced revenue for the mobile industry by raising the value of advanced handsets, enabling higher games revenue and driving network data service usage. However, the rollout of compelling applications is being held back by disruptive platform variability, forcing software developers to create many different variants of each application, raising costs, and slowing the widespread availability of advanced content. The new OpenKODE initiative will bring together the family of Khronos Application Programming Interfaces (APIs): OpenGL ES for 3D graphics, OpenMAX for streaming media, OpenVG for vector 2D graphics and OpenSL ES for audio; and will define a new user-input API and potentially add new APIs for access to functionality such as multi-player networking and operating system resources to create a complete, coherently designed, reliably available coding platform that can be implemented across a wide variety of mobile and embedded devices and operating systems – including closed real-time operating systems.
About Khronos
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenKODE, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX, OpenVG, OpenSL ES, OpenML and COLLADA to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to www.khronos.org for more information.
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Khronos, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenMAX and OpenSL ES are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. COLLADA is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. used by permission by Khronos. OpenGL and OpenML are registered trademarks and the OpenGL ES logo is a trademark of Silicon Graphics Inc. used by permission by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.
