The Khronos Group

*Smarter shadows for leaves, fences, and hair without the any-hit tax.* A focused bonus course tucked inside Building a Simple Engine's "Extra Courses," aimed at one very specific ray tracing performance problem: alpha-tested geometry. Foliage, chain-link fences, and hair force the GPU to run an any-hit shader on every BVH intersection, and that cost explodes exactly where scenes look best. Opacity Micromaps (`VK_KHR_opacity_micromap`) bake per-triangle opacity directly into the acceleration structure, so hardware can resolve fully-opaque or fully-transparent triangles during traversal with no shader invocation at all. * Why alpha testing is expensive, a tour of BVH traversal and any-hit shader cost * What micromaps are and how they attach opacity states directly to acceleration structures * Hardware traversal walkthrough: the same shadow ray, with and without OMM * A full implementation walkthrough in the Simple Engine, plus results, guidance, and tradeoffs https://lnkd.in/g8UMj_2Q #Vulkan #micromap #tutorial #gpu #programming

Khronos Group Welcomes Xiaomi as Contributor Member Xiaomi Corporation was founded in April 2010. Xiaomi Technology is a consumer electronics and smart manufacturing company with smartphones and smart hardware connected by an IoT platform at its core. Embracing their vision of “Make friends with users and be the coolest company in the users’ hearts”, Xiaomi continuously pursues innovations, high-quality user experience and operational efficiency. The company relentlessly builds amazing products with honest prices to let everyone in the world enjoy a better life through innovative technology. https://www.mi.com/global #membership #Khronos

#SIGGRAPH2026: The Khronos Group Networking Reception We're proud to sponsor the Khronos Networking Reception, 6-9 p.m. PDT at JW Marriott Los Angeles L.A Live. Stop by the Cesium table to meet the team, see our latest demos (including a Mars rover experience), and connect with others building the future of open 3D. Please RSVP if you plan to join us: https://hubs.li/Q04pngSc0

Our table is set up and ready for you to come play our new Mars rover game!! Join us this evening at the The Khronos Group reception at the JW Marriott!! #SIGGRAPH26

This week at SIGGRAPH I have the privilege of moderating multiple sessions as the 3D Formats (glTF) working group co-chair. If you're here, come say hello! Today I'll be at the 3D Gaussian Splat BoF called From Splats to Worlds, then the MSF 3D Assets BoF following directly after it. Tomorrow at the JW Marriott, we get to talk more about glTF 2.1 in the Khronos Dev Day track (which culminates in a great reception in the evening). And on Thursday, we have a BoF dedicated to Geospatial and 3D Tiles where Cesium and Esri will present together! Then if you want to talk more about glTF, reach out and I will invite you to the Khronos glTF ecosystem forum happening Thursday evening. It's already a great week!

OpenXR just lowered the barrier to official conformance! Khronos is introducing tiered Adopter Program fees based on company size, replacing the old one-size-fits-all model. Smaller XR hardware makers, runtime builders, and SDK teams can now pursue official OpenXR conformance without the cost structure built for large platform companies — while the technical bar for conformance stays exactly the same. Why it matters: more conformant implementations means more deployment options, more dependable portability, and lower integration costs for everyone building on OpenXR. Read the full breakdown: https://lnkd.in/gfPmbxX5 If you're at SIGGRAPH 2026 in LA, catch the OpenXR session today, Wednesday July 22, 2:00-3:30pm PDT: "OpenXR: From XR Portability to Spatial Computing Platform" at the JW Marriott L.A. LIVE, Diamond ballroom. We'll cover the Spatial Entity Framework, OpenXR 1.1, the expanded Extension Matrix, and best practices for shipping across headsets, AR glasses, and mobile. Details: https://lnkd.in/gW86UdcC #OpenXR #SIGGRAPH2026 #XR #AR #VR #spatial

The Khronos BOF Day is underway! We have an exciting schedule starting with #WebGL and #WebGPU. Starting at 10, #glTF starts followed by #ANARI, Maching Learning, #Slang, #OpenXR and #Vulkan ending the day. Come and join us at the JW Marriott Los Angeles L.A. Live | Ballroom Diamond 1 & 2 Full schedule: https://lnkd.in/gAGW4Thm #SIGGRAPH2026 #programming

Real Time Live! Siggraph 2026 I blew off the Pioneers meeting which always conflicts with Real Time Live! and whoah did I make the right decision. The show was fantastic..for many reasons. There were 8 live demos (not too many not too few). Mk Haley Haley was the chair and she did an amazing job emceeing the event, a very important component of the show. The demos themselves were amazing! They ranged from real time video generation of live characters, to an audience participation demo where you typed in an object you wanted to see in a car racing game and hilariously a bunch of potatoes showed up, it twas amusing. The audience favorite turned out to be a demo using the decades old visible human project (your tax dollars still at work) where they were able to practice anatomy slicing up the cadaver in a number of ways such as retraction and pulling out anatomical organs. Aside from the technically incredible demo the presenters made many terrible puns using the anatomy such as “I got my eye on you” while slicing open the head to expose the eye, “he has a lot of heart” while pulling the heart out of the body. There is no replacement a little good humor! My hat’s off to the organizers for making a difficult logistical effort look easy. #siggraph #realtimelive

🎉 Really happy to see this finally released to the 3ds Max community! 🎉 I was fortunate to be brought in by The Khronos Group to help get the repository and plugin release-ready. I helped polish the plugin by fixing bugs, improving stability, and tackling performance bottlenecks ahead of the public release. A big thank you to Eric Chadwick for making the initial connection and bringing me on board. And, of course, full credit goes to Satoshi Hayashi, who created the original glTF for 3ds Max Plugin project. It was a pleasure to contribute during the final stretch and help make it available to the wider community. Looking forward to seeing the 3ds Max users put it to good use!