OpenVG graphics acceleration announced for mobile phones

The Khronos Group is pleased to announce that it has ratified and publicly released the OpenVG 1.0 royalty-free, open standard for low-level 2D vector graphics. OpenVG enables hardware acceleration of libraries such as such as Flash and SVG, enabling high-quality, anti-aliased, scalable 2D vector graphics on embedded and handheld devices with highly interactive performance and low levels of power consumption.

Developed by Khronos members including 3Dlabs, ATI, Bitboys, BitFlash, DMP, Ericsson, Falanx, Hybrid Graphics, Ikivo, Imagination Technologies, Nokia, NVIDIA, Motorola, PalmSource, Symbian and Sun Microsystems, the OpenVG standard has been designed to seamlessly interoperate with OpenGL ES 3D graphics, creating a high-performance, fully integrated 2D and 3D embedded graphics acceleration environment. The OpenVG API specification is available for free download at http://www.khronos.org/openvg/.

Handheld devices have an urgent need for the smooth and fluidly scalable 2D that high-quality vector graphics can provide to create high-quality user interfaces, new-generation mapping and GPS displays, compelling 2D games and ultra-readable text on small displays. SVG Tiny, SVG Basic and Flash Mobile are designed for mobile devices, and OpenVG accelerates these by defining a low-level hardware acceleration layer that will enable graphics silicon to provide great performance for these packages at very low power-levels. OpenVG 1.0 was defined in only twelve months using the established Khronos Working Group process, and Khronos expects to update the OpenVG specification annually in order to track and enable the rapid developments of graphics capabilities in handheld and embedded devices.

Khronos will release details of an OpenVG 1.0 Adopter's Program in the second half of 2005, including a Conformance Testing Program enabling conformant products to use the OpenVG trademark ensuring that conformant OpenVG implementations provide a reliable, cross-platform 2D graphics programming platform. Additionally, a reference OpenVG implementation for Windows, coded by Hybrid Graphics, will be freely available within the next month to anyone wishing to experiment with OpenVG functionality.

The latest version of the EGL library for interfacing with and controlling platform, memory and buffer resources -- EGL 1.2 -- has been extended to enable seamless rendering using both OpenGL ES and OpenVG enabling high-performance, accelerated, mixed-mode 2D and 3D rendering. Now that OpenVG 1.0 is publicly released, Khronos will include OpenVG educational lectures in the worldwide Khronos Developer University series to teach developers how to use OpenVG and the advantages of scalable vector graphics.