Khronos Group
The Khronos Group, Inc. is an open, non-profit, member-driven consortium of 170 organizations developing, publishing and maintaining royalty-free interoperability standards for 3D graphics, virtual reality, augmented reality, parallel computation, vision acceleration and machine learning. The open standards and associated conformance tests enable software applications and middleware to effectively harness authoring and accelerated playback of dynamic media across a wide variety of platforms and devices. The group is based in Beaverton, Oregon. History. The Khronos Group was founded in 2000 by companies including 3Dlabs, ATI, Discreet, Evans & Sutherland, Intel, SGI, and Sun Microsystems. Promoter members include  AMD, Apple, Arm, Epic Games, Google, Huawei, Nokia, Imagination, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony, Valve and Verisilcon. Its president is Neil Trevett. Specifications and working groups. Each specification is managed by a working group which is established to define the requirements, solicit input, discuss, and create a specification. There are currently 16 working groups. Exploratory Groups. Typically, Khronos first creates an exploratory group to gauge industry interest before creating a working group, which companies can join as members to assist in the development of the standard. Khronos and the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA) established an Embedded Camera API Exploratory  Group to explore industry interest in the creation of open, royalty-free API standards for controlling embedded cameras and sensors. Standards. Active standards. A timeline of API Specification ratification and releases can be found on the Khronos Group website. Members. Membership and contributions. Khronos members may contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, vote at various stages before public deployment, and accelerate delivery of their platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. To ensure that the standards are consistently implemented and to create a reliable platform for developers, any product that implements a Khronos  API standard must pass conformance tests. An API Adopter Program enables companies to test their products for conformance. Membership in Khronos Group provides access to an IP framework designed to protect participant IP. Khronos members agree not to assert IP rights against adopters implementing Khronos specifications. The IP framework protects Khronos members from exposure to patent lawsuits and reduces the amount of IP that needs to be licensed from other group members.