Collada Joins Khronos Group As Sony, Nvidia Sign Up

Representatives from Sony and industry consortium The Khronos Group have announced that the Sony-originated Collada file format standard project has elected to join Khronos, in order to further its work as an open standard under Khronos' open participation process and royalty-free intellectual property (IP) framework. Founded in 2000, the Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as OpenGL ES, OpenMAX, OpenML, OpenVG and OpenSL ES, and now Collada. Short for “Collaborative Design Activity”, Collada defines an XML-based schema to enable 3D authoring applications to freely exchange digital assets without loss of information - enabling multiple software packages to be combined into tool chains, and is intended for use in the digital entertainment and game industry. "Collada has already made great progress with strong industry support - and now the time has come to formalize our standardization process by joining Khronos to ensure that any company can participate in its development and to ensure the standard will always be freely available," said Masa Chatani, corporate executive and CTO at SCEI. Numerous companies have supported and developed Collada, including 3D Labs, Alias, Aegia, Autodesk, ATI, Havok, Nvidia and Softimage. The new standard is intended to enable content creation pipelines that can automatically condition and scale 3D geometry and texture assets for real-time playback on a wide diversity of platforms - and will be developed in a dedicated Khronos working group that any Khronos member will be free to join. In addition, it has been announced that Nvidia and Sony Computer Electronic Inc. (SCEI) have become Khronos promoting members, gaining both companies a seat on the board of directors that direct Khronos activities. Nvidia's GoForce family of wireless media processors already use Khronos APIs in their mobile phone and handheld products, and SCEI’s primary interest is currently the Collada project.