New liaison will advance open geospatial standards related to augmented and virtual reality, distributed simulation, and 3D content services

10 October, 2018: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and  The Khronos® Group,  an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, announce a liaison to jointly advance open geospatial standards related to the fields of augmented and virtual reality, distributed simulation, and 3D content services.

As part of the liaison, and through collaborative participation in OGC and Khronos initiatives — such as working groups, committee activities,  Innovation Program Initiatives (e.g., Testbeds, Pilots), regional forums, and workshops — the two organizations will work jointly to develop use cases and requirements for open geospatial standards concerning 3D, VR and AR APIs and related graphical representations.

OGC and Khronos will together assess the current state of adopted and de facto standards within the above fields and consider collaborative publication of one or more of those standards, while also identifying any future potential standards that will facilitate the interoperability of relevant data and hardware capabilities for the sharing and analysis of geospatial data.

Further, OGC will adopt published Khronos standards as part of the  OGC Standards Baseline where it believes their inclusion to be appropriate, or where Khronos standards are normatively referenced by OGC standards.

OGC Executive Director of the Standards Program, Scott Simmons, commented: “OGC and Khronos share many common members and objectives, and the two organizations have collaborated informally for years. In establishing this relationship, our organizations can more effectively align 3D data and graphic standards to offer developers and users a more concise and consistent set of options for 3D visualization and processing.”

Khronos Group President, Neil Trevett commented: “Khronos greatly values our productive working relationship with OGC, and we are highly motivated by this formal liaison to enable even more effective cooperation. We see strong alignment between the organizations and welcome the opportunity to work together to provide a strong standards-based foundation for OGC to portably access 3D, VR, and AR hardware and assets. Together, we can enable the geospatial community with exciting new capabilities.”

OGC and Khronos have previously worked together on web visualization standards, such as the  OGC 3D Portrayal Standard, and Khronos members have actively contributed to the  OGC 3D Information Management Domain Working Group and various standards efforts that have emerged from that group.

About Khronos

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics, vision and machine learning on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include Vulkan®, OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenGL® SC, WebGL™, COLLADA™, OpenXR™ and glTF™. Khronos members are enabled 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 accelerated platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. For more information about The Khronos Group visit  Khronos.org.

About OGC

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international consortium of more than 525 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that ‘geo-enable’ the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful within any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at  www.opengeospatial.org.



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Khronos Press Contact:
Alex Crabb, Caster Communications Inc.
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