Tag: Khronos Group

Copyright hindering democratisation of 3D

Gavin Greenwalt: Copyright owners own the right to models of their products
Gavin Greenwalt: Copyright owners own the right to models of their products

Increasing power of GPUs is enabling designers to create 3D models quicker and in greater detail. Such additional details may include specific models of cars, cameras or other products instead of just generic models. This should pave the way towards democratisation of 3D.

However, a major barrier can halt this progress.

While creating a specific product is now easier, using that created model may be a challenge. Standing in the way are copyright laws and more importantly, copyright owners.

“Copyright owners own the right to models of their products. They can decide whether users can use or should remove 3D models of their products. Users need to seek permission to use such models,” said Gavin Greenwalt, Senior Artist of Straightface Studios.

Khronos updates OpenCL 1.2 specification

khronos-group-logoThe Knronos Group has announced the ratification and public release of an update to the OpenCL 1.2 specification, the open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors. This backwards compatible version updates the core OpenCL 1.2 specification with bug fixes and clarifications and defines additional optional extensions for enhanced performance, functionality and robustness for parallel programming on a wide variety of platforms. Optional extensions are not required to be supported by a conformant OpenCL implementation, but are expected to be widely available; they define functionality that is likely to move into the required feature set in a future revision of the OpenCL specification. The updated OpenCL 1.2 specifications, together with online reference pages and reference cards, are available at www.khronos.org/opencl/.

“The OpenCL working group continues to listen closely to the demands of the developer community, and this update provides a timely increase in functionality and reliability of code ported across vendor implementations,” said Neil Trevett, chair of the OpenCL working group, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA. “The new extensions enable early access to functionality for key use cases, including security capabilities for implementations of WebCL that enable access to OpenCL within a browser.”