Khronos Announces New OpenKODE Initiative

The Khronos Group has announced the creation of a new open standard working group: the OpenKODE (Khronos Open Development Environment) initiative, which intends to create a coherent development and deployment platform to enable the development of portable, high-performance media applications for mobile handsets. This royalty-free standard will be developed under the Khronos Working Group process with a target of a first public release within twelve months. Any company with an interest in this initiative is encouraged to join Khronos and participate in defining the scope, requirements and direction for the initiative and to gain early access to draft specifications before public release. The OpenKODE Working Group will commence work during January 2006. More details about joining Khronos may be found at Khronos' website. Advanced media applications, including 3D games, are thought to drive enhanced revenue for the mobile industry by raising the value of advanced handsets, enabling higher games revenue and driving network data service usage. However, the rollout of compelling applications may be held back by platform variability, forcing software developers to create many different variants of each application, raising costs, and slowing the widespread availability of advanced content. OpenKODE will bring together the family of Khronos Media Application Programming Interfaces (APIs): OpenGL ES for 3D graphics, OpenMAX for streaming media, OpenVG for vector 2D graphics and OpenSL ES for audio; and will define a new user-input API and potentially add new APIs for access to functionality such as multi-player networking and operating system resources to create a platform that can be implemented across a wide variety of mobile and embedded devices. OpenKODE will provide a C-based development environment to games developers working on PC and console platforms. OpenKODE will also complement Java-based platforms by enabling development of C-based libraries, gaming engines and applications that can be invoked from Java applications.