Over the past year, I’ve had the privilege of building a new set of glTF showcase assets for the Khronos Group. These models were designed not just to look great in the updated glTF Sample Viewer, but to demonstrate what’s possible with glTF today—and to share the workflows behind them so artists can apply these techniques in their own projects. Each asset comes with a step-by-step creation guide on GitHub, detailing the modeling, materials, and export process, including how to make the most of glTF’s growing set of extensions. The goal is to give artists clear, reproducible examples of how to achieve realistic results in compact, efficient 3D models. In this post, I’ll introduce the four newest showcase assets and talk about the unique challenges they present. You can explore the models directly in the Sample Viewer, dig into their source files on GitHub, and follow detailed creation notes for each one.

As the 3D commerce industry evolves, artists and brands alike need clear, up-to-date guidance to efficiently produce optimized assets. Today, we're excited to announce the launch of version 2.0 of the Asset Creation Guidelines—a comprehensive and continuously updated resource designed to help 3D artists create photorealistic, commerce-ready assets for web, XR, games, and other real-time 3D applications. Like the original Real-Time Asset Creation Guidelines, these best practices use glTF as a de facto target format, and can be applied to any 3D content creation workflow. The new Asset Creation Guidelines are designed to help artists ranging from beginners to experts develop 3D cross-platform content for real-time rendering. If you’ve ever wondered how to create a photorealistic 3D model, how to animate a model to show how it works in addition to how it looks, or how to compress a 3D model for faster download, this resource is for you.

The Khronos ANARI (Analytic Rendering Interface) Working Group is excited to share developments as we approach SIGGRAPH 2025, including a first look at ANARI 1.1 updates. With ANARI 1.1 features planned and a growing ecosystem of tools and implementations, the industry's first cross-platform 3D rendering engine API continues to evolve to meet the demands of modern scientific visualization and rendering applications.

As excitement builds for SIGGRAPH 2025, the Khronos Group is preparing to host its annual Vulkan Birds of a Feather session at SIGGRAPH 2025 on Wednesday, August 13, from 4:30 to 6:00 pm. The BOF is an essential gathering for graphics developers, GPU vendors, and graphics enthusiasts eager to stay on the cutting edge of the industry’s leading cross-platform graphics and compute API. This year’s Vulkan BOF will be packed with meaningful updates and will provide a great opportunity for community engagement. In this blog post, we preview the key Vulkan developments, initiatives, and events that will take center stage at the BOF, including: an update on Vulkan 1.4 adoption, recent extensions, a proposed new deprecation mechanism, enhancements to our samples and documentation, plus updates on the Vulkanised 2026 conference, and much more.

The set of extensions known as Vulkan Video, developed by the Vulkan® Working Group at The Khronos® Group, provides developers with vendor-independent access to video decoding and encoding functionality in modern GPU hardware. Today, with the release of version 1.4.321 of the Vulkan specification, Vulkan Video is once again being expanded for encoding operations with the introduction of the Encode Intra-refresh extension—the second

Synchronization in Vulkan® has long been one of its most notorious challenges, something developers haven’t been shy about reminding us. The Khronos® Vulkan Working Group has been steadily working to make Vulkan a joy to use, and simplifying the synchronization model has been high on our priority list. One of the most frequent developer frustrations has been the complexity of managing image layouts, a pain point we’re tackling

The Khronos® OpenXR™ Working Group has released a groundbreaking set of OpenXR extensions that establish the first open standard for spatial computing, enabling consistent cross-platform support for plane and marker detection and tracking, precise spatial anchors, and cross-session persistence. These new Spatial Entities Extensions are now available for public review, and we invite developers to provide feedback to help drive the continued evolution. As the first implementations roll out in 2025, this milestone brings developers powerful new tools for building persistent, interoperable XR spatial experiences across a growing range of devices.

The set of extensions known as "Vulkan Video", developed by the Vulkan® Working Group at Khronos®, provides developers with vendor-independent access to video decoding and encoding functionality in modern GPU hardware. Today, with the release of version 1.4.317 of the Vulkan specification, this set of extensions is being expanded once again with the introduction of VP9 decoding. VP9 was among the first royalty-free codecs to gain mass ado

VisIt, the open-source scientific visualization tool developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), is entering a new era of advanced rendering. In a collaborative effort between LLNL’s VisIt team and NVIDIA, VisIt has been enhanced with state-of-the-art rendering capabilities by integrating a Khronos Group standard called ANARI™ (Analytic Rendering Interface). This integration, led by Kevin Griffin (a senior developer technology engineer at NVIDIA, ANARI working group member, and former LLNL employee) and in partnership with LLNL developers Kathleen Biagas and Mark Miller, brings physically accurate ray tracing, global illumination, and broader platform support to VisIt’s high-performance visualization workflows.

OpenVX, the industry-standard graph compute API for computer vision and machine learning, has recently introduced three new provisional extensions that significantly enhance its programming model. In this post, we’ll explore what’s new, why it matters, and how developers can benefit.

The Khronos® Group is celebrating a significant milestone as SYCL™ marks its tenth anniversary. First ratified and published in May 2015, SYCL has grown from an ambitious specification to a cornerstone of heterogeneous computing, enabling developers to write single-source C++ code for a wide range of accelerators, including CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and specialized AI hardware. The SYCL developer community and members of the Khronos SYCL Working Group recently gathered at the International Workshop on OpenCL and SYCL (IWOCL 2025) to share the latest developments in the SYCL ecosystem, and celebrate this milestone.

In June 2024, the Khronos 3D Formats Working Group released the glTF 2.0 Interactivity draft extension (KHR_interactivity) for public review and comment. Now, thanks to valuable community feedback and almost a year of continued development, we are nearing the finish line on releasing KHR_interactivity together with a set of companion extensions. These extensions provide a straightforward, standardized method for embedding interactive behaviors directly within glTF 3D assets, enabling developers to create engaging 3D experiences with consistent interactive functionality across different platforms and applications. As we prepare to submit the glTF interactivity extensions to the Khronos Board for ratification, we are seeking final input from early adopters. We invite content creators, artists, implementers, and engine developers to explore and experiment with the openly available tools and sample assets to integrate interactive glTF content into their projects.

The 13th International Workshop on OpenCL™ and SYCL™ (IWOCL 2025), held from April 7–11 in Heidelberg, Germany, brought together a vibrant community of developers, researchers, and industry professionals. This year's event confirmed something many of us in the field have long suspected: far from being overshadowed by newer technologies, OpenCL continues to evolve and thrive as a critical foundation for cross-platform high-performance computing across industries.

Google delivers a wide range of continuously evolving hardware products to a vast global audience. Google’s smartphones, smart watches, earbuds, tablets, smart home devices and more are sold through the Google Store and physical and digital third-party retail vendors around the world. As a global brand known for breaking new ground with AI, smart home, and personal device experiences, Google is faced with a significant challenge: creating engaging, effective product training and marketing materials that work anywhere in the world.