The Khronos Group announced today that it has ratified the OpenGL ES 1.0 royalty-free open standard for advanced 2D and 3D graphics in embedded systems including mobile and handheld devices, and that the API specification is now available for free download. OpenGL ES defines subset profiles of OpenGL; OpenGL and OpenGL ES are royalty-free, open standard APIs that enable authoring and playback of dynamic… media on a wide variety of platforms and devices, Khronos said.

OpenGL ES 1.0 can support software implementations as small as 50Kbytes, and can enable hardware graphics pipeline acceleration on both fixed point and floating point systems, the group said. Additionally, the OpenGL ES working group has simultaneously defined a companion specification to OpenGL ES, called EGL 1.0, which standardizes how OpenGL ES may be integrated into a wide diversity of operating systems.

In a related announcement, Sun Microsystems anounced that it has joined the group as a Promoting Member to encourage the development and adoption of OpenGL ES as an important open standard for graphics hardware acceleration in mobile devices, and that Sun will work with the Khronos Group to enable OpenGL ES to support the graphics requirements of the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition graphical APIs.

According to Khronos, OpenGL ES 1.0 was produced in less than twelve months using the Khronos Working Group process. Additionally, Khronos said it intends to update OpenGL ES annually in order to track and enable the rapid developments of graphics capabilities in handheld and embedded devices.

Within three months, Khronos also plans to release details of an OpenGL ES 1.0 Adopter's Program, to enable interested companies to join Khronos for a small administrative fee in order to gain access to source code for Conformance Tests and example implementations, and to use the OpenGL ES trademark on products that pass the defined testing procedure.

Now that the OpenGL ES 1.0 specification is ratified, Khronos is initiating a parallel working group to create a closely-related OpenGL profile to meet the particular needs of safety critical markets — including automotive and avionics displays. Any company interested to participate in this development is encouraged to join the Khronos Group and help ensure that this new OpenGL ES profile meets the needs of the industry.

The OpenGL ES 1.0 and EGL 1.0 specifications are now available for free download from Khronos for any third party to implement in products with no licensing restrictions or royalties.

Additional perspective on this announcement is provided by the following article from EE Times . . .

 
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