The Khronos Group, Inc. is an American non-profit member-funded industry consortium based in Beaverton, Oregon, focused on the creation of open standard, royalty-free application programming interfaces (APIs) for authoring and accelerated playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. 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.
On 31 July 2006, it was announced at SIGGRAPH that control of the OpenGL specification would be passed to the group.
The Khronos Group was founded in 2000 by companies including ATI Technologies, Discreet, Evans & Sutherland, Intel Corporation, NVIDIA, Silicon Graphics (SGI), and Sun Microsystems. It now has roughly 120 member companies, over 30 adopters, and 24 conforming members. Its president is Neil Trevett.
COLLADA, a file-format intended to facilitate interchange of 3D assetsEGL, an interface between Khronos rendering APIs such as OpenGL ES or OpenVG and the underlying native platform window systemglTF, a file format specification for 3D scenes and modelsOpenCL, a cross-platform computation API.OpenGL, a cross-platform computer graphics APIOpenGL ES, a derivative of OpenGL for use on mobile and embedded systems, such as cell phones, portable gaming devices, and moreOpenGL SC, a safety critical profile of OpenGL ES designed to meet the needs of the safety-critical marketOpenKCam, Advanced Camera Control APIOpenKODE, an API for providing abstracted, portable access to operating system resources such as file systems, networks and math librariesOpenMAX, a layered set of three programming interfaces of various abstraction levels, providing access to multimedia functionalityOpenML, an API for capturing, transporting, processing, displaying, and synchronizing digital mediaOpenSL ES, an audio API tuned for embedded systems, standardizing access to features such as 3D positional audio and MIDI playbackOpenVG, an API for accelerating processing of 2D vector graphicsOpenVX, Hardware acceleration API for Computer Vision applications and librariesOpenWF, APIs for 2D graphics composition and display controlOpenXR, an open and royalty-free standard for virtual reality and augmented reality applications and devicesSPIR, a intermediate compiler target for OpenCL and VulkanStreamInput, an API for consistently handling input devicesVulkan, a low-overhead computer graphics APIWebCL, a JavaScript binding to OpenCL within a browserWebGL, a JavaScript binding to OpenGL ES within a browser on any platform supporting the OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics standardsKhronos Group divides its members followingly:
Promoter – have full working group participation and voting rights plus the right to designate a Director to the Khronos Board.Contributor – have full working group participation and voting rights.Associate - have full working group participation but without working group voting rights.Academic – have full working group participation but without working group voting rights.Current members (as of 11 November 2016) are (highlights):
ATI (before being purchased by AMD)Creative TechnologyEricssonid SoftwareLucasfilm Ltd.MotorolaOracle/Sun MicrosystemsKhronos Group maintains current lists of its members
