Khronos glTF Extensions Make 3D Assets More Realistic Than Ever
Khronos® announces the ratification of the latest Physically Based Rendering (PBR) material extensions for glTF™. This latest set of PBR extensions for glTF will allow developers and artists to create more photorealistic 3D graphics that can be deployed on web browsers, mobile browsers and apps, and more.
The three new extensions build on the existing support for PBR in the glTF 2.0 format by adding refraction, specular, and volume-based lighting. These extensions allow a wider range of products and objects to be represented realistically as 3D assets:
- KHR_materials_ior: The Index of Refraction describes the way that light is scattered as it passes through a material. By enabling artists to set different IOR values, a diverse range of materials can be made to look more realistic, including air, water, eyes, glass, sapphire and diamond.
- KHR_materials_specular: Specular properties are an object’s mirror-like properties: its ability to reflect light regularly, creating coherent reflections of other objects. The specular extension adds two parameters to the metallic-roughness material: specular and specularColor. Specular allows users to configure the strength of the specular reflection, and specularColor which allows artists to use effects known from the specular-glossiness material. This extension allows artists to design more beautifully lit virtual photoshoots of products.
- KHR_materials_volume: The volumes extension enables mesh surfaces to act as an interface between volumes and to enable more realistic refraction and absorption properties to be seen in transparent materials. This extension gives translucent materials the appearance of depth and heft.
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Enabling Consistent and Powerful Asset Product Metadata for 3D Commerce
As the number of 3D assets used in e-commerce rapidly increases, the need to embed semantic information describing virtual products within real-time 3D formats such as glTF becomes ever more urgent. 3D asset files that contain descriptive and administrative metadata such as product descriptions, details on intellectual property rights, creation and modification dates and other detailed authoring history - all in multiple languages - will enable the management of 3D virtual product catalogs, and the sharing of assets between vendors, retailers and end user platforms at industrial scale.
To address this, Khronos announced the release of the provisional KHR_xmp_json_ld glTF extension to add full compliance to JSON-LD, replacing the original KHR_xmp extension. Support for JSON-LD serialization significantly increases the power and flexibility of the extension, making it a perfect vessel to carry information about products within the 3D commerce ecosystem. You can use the KHR_xmp_json_ld extension today, and Khronos is seeking community feedback on the provisional specification before finalization. If you have feedback please submit an issue, here.
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OpenCL 3.0.8 Released
OpenCL 3.0.8 has been released with new integer dot product extension – especially useful for accelerated inferencing using quantized neural networks. More...
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Khronos YouTube Channel
We completed some spring cleaning and reorganized the Khronos YouTube channel in order to help you find the videos you are looking for. Give it a look.

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Vulkan YouTube Channel
Check out the new Vulkan YouTube channel where you'll find video presentations from spec developers and Vulkan users with information and recent updates on Vulkan. Subscribe to make sure you catch the latest from the Vulkan team.

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The Khronies
Thank you to the recent recipients of the Khronie Awards. These special awards are presented to individuals who have made significant contributions to the Khronos Group.
Congratulations to:
- Eric Chadwick - 3D Commerce™ & 3D Formats
- Alexey Knyazev - 3D Formats
- Daniel Koch - Vulkan®, OpenGL® & OpenGL ES™
- Ashleigh Miller - 3D Commerce & 3D Formats
- James Riordon - The Khronos Group
For more information on Khronie recipients, visit our Khronie Awards page.
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WebGL + WebGPU Meetup
July 13, 2021
Yesterday's WebGL™ + WebGPU Meetup was a great success with updates from WebGL and WebGPU, porting WebGL codebase to WebGPU, updates on the glTF Sample Viewer and new glTF extensions for artists, leveraging multi-draw to speed up rendering, and a demonstration of enabling SRP Batcher with WebGL. The speakers' presentations have been posted here.
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AREA WorkinAR Session
June 23, 2021
This session was focused on helping people get up to speed with terminologies, goals, challenges, approaches and current status of enterprise AR interoperability. It was recorded and is available here.
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RTC 2021
May 12, 2021
Khronos President, Neil Trevett's session, Building the Metaverse One Standard at a Time, was recorded and is available.
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SIGGRAPH 2021
August 9-13, 2021
The Khronos Birds of a Feather (BOF) schedule has been released. Click through to see BOFs and sessions from OpenXR, 3D Commerce, glTF and Vulkan! More...
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CEDEC 2021
August 24-26, 2021
CEDEC is the premier computer entertainment developers conference in Japan. Khronos session information will be coming soon. More...
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AI Hardware Summit
September 13-15, 2021
We’re partnering with the AI Hardware Summit this year and many of our members are featured on the agenda. AI Hardware Summit is evolving as they continue their mission to help those who are accelerating AI workloads in the cloud and at the edge, and this year is about systems level AI acceleration. All Khronos members receive an exclusive discount of 15% by using "KHRONOS15" when registering. More...
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ISMAR 2021
October 4-8, 2021
IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) is the premier conference for Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR). ISMAR explores the advances in commercial and research activities related to AR and MR and Virtual Reality (VR) by continuing the expansion of its scope over the past several years. Khronos session information will be coming soon. More...
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