The Khronos Group is running a survey on the broader shader ecosystem — languages, tools, pain points, and where standardization is needed most. If you write shading code in any language (Slang, HLSL, GLSL, WGSL, etc.), your input helps shape where Khronos focuses next.

Results will be shared at the SIGGRAPH Real-Time Shading BOF this year.

Deadline: July 10

It's anonymous, takes a few minutes, and covers everything from debugging/profiling pain points to what you think the future of shader standards should look like.

With the release of Godot 4.7, the Godot Asset Store is officially open. The store currently features the OpenXR vendors plugin and free samples on how to do hand tracking, passthrough and other helpful examples to get you started. The store is expected to add paid assets in the future. 

The 3D Formats working group at The Khronos Group that manages the glTF 3D Asset open standard has established a Volumetric Media Subgroup. This Subgroup will extend glTF to enable interoperability in key areas of the volumetric pipeline including capture, data formats, and content playback, to accelerate innovation and enable widespread adoption.

Since the release of glTF 2.0 in 2017, the format has matured into a rich ecosystem spanning mesh compression, texture optimization, 3D Gaussian splats, and more. Today, the Khronos 3D Formats Working Group is excited to announce plans for glTF 2.1: a focused, backward-compatible revision of the core specification, built around a single motivation — making glTF work as well for large, composed scenes as it already does for single assets. Every feature in this release addresses a real gap that today forces teams toward proprietary conventions, custom tooling, or workarounds that break interoperability.

In the Mapping the World with Bilawal Sidhu series, Bilawal interviews Khronos Group President Neil Trevett. Neil explains how the new KHR_gaussian_splatting extension brings 3D Gaussian splats into glTF -- the royalty-free open format already used across the web for 3D content. He describes the core splat representation as stable enough for standardization, noting that Khronos moved quickly to prevent ecosystem fragmentation. The extension includes a graceful fallback to point cloud rendering for unsupported viewers. He also previews glTF's broader ambition: evolving beyond a visual container format to support scene understanding and semantics, positioning it as foundational infrastructure for both the spatial web and embodied AI.

In this podcast by Spatial Realities, Khronos' Frederic Plourde is interviewed by Thomas Bedenk. Frederic updated Thomas on where OpenXR stands, how it has developed over the last couple of years, and where it is heading. Frederic also previewed an upcoming feature called multi-app support. 

The UHD World Association (UWA) has published the industry's first spatial imaging standard for 3D Gaussian Splatting content, developed in direct technical coordination with the Khronos Group's 3D Formats Working Group.

The standard addresses the lack of a common exchange format for 3DGS content by centering on glTF as its storage format, with compatibility for meshes and point clouds, and outer-layer packaging via MP4 and HEIF. It also introduces EGSC, a new codec delivering up to 30x compression with visually lossless quality on mobile devices.

UWA and the Khronos Group have entered into a strategic partnership to develop globally unified standards for spatial imaging, jointly launching the CKAP China Graphics Working Group to promote standards coordination, including references to the KHR_Gaussian_Splatting extension and tool contributions.

In this blog from Collabora, Colloabora introduces their work with environmental nonprofit SOMAR to build an open source XR experience that immerses users in the underwater soundscape of Portugal's Algarve, using real acoustic recordings to illustrate the harmful effects of human-made noise pollution on marine life. Built on OpenXR, the experience was designed to run on standalone headsets as well as Google Cardboard-compatible phone setups, maximizing accessibility for broader audiences. SOMAR has already debuted the application publicly to strong reception, using it as a hands-on advocacy tool with students, families, and the general public.

The Vulkan SDK 1.4.350.0 is now available for download simultaneously for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Highlights of this release include major updates for KosmicKrisp, support for 16 new extensions, and ARM64X support for the GFXReconstruct capture layer. Overall, this maintenance-focused update brings tooling and platform-specific improvements while continuing Vulkan’s steady evolution.

The Khronos Vulkan SC Working Group, in collaboration with RasterGrid, has released the Vulkan SC 1.0.21 SDK, a unified installer for Linux and Windows that combines the Vulkan SC Loader, emulation driver stack, validation layers, device simulation layer, pipeline cache utilities, cube sample, info tool, and CMake and Pipeline Cache Compiler integration in a single package. The SDK replaces the previous process of installing and configuring each component separately, and offers optional automatic environment setup and Pipeline Cache Compiler discovery during installation. The installers are available now on GitHub.

The Khronos OpenCL Working Group has released OpenCL 3.1, moving a number of previously optional capabilities into the core specification. Conformant implementations are now required to consume SPIR-V™ kernels, and to support subgroups, integer dot products, a suggested work-group size query, and a device UUID query that matches Vulkan®'s. The release also includes clarifications to the memory model, event synchronization, and OpenCL C printf, among other refinements. Implementations are in progress from Arm, Imagination, Intel, Mesa, and Qualcomm, along with the Rusticl, PoCL, and CLVK open source projects, across desktop, mobile, and embedded platforms. Read the full announcement on the Khronos Blog, and if you're at IWOCL 2026, come talk to the working group.

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The OpenCL Working Group has published a draft extension (cl_khr_cooperative_matrix) that brings cooperative matrix operations — a key technology for accelerating ML inference — to OpenCL, developed in collaboration with Arm, Intel, and Qualcomm. A companion extension to expose these capabilities directly in the OpenCL C language is also in progress, and the community is invited to review both drafts and provide feedback before they are finalized.

We're proud to welcome Meta to the Khronos Group Board of Directors! Meta has upgraded their membership from Contributor to Promoter — our highest membership tier — bringing with it a seat on the Board and a deeper commitment to shaping the future of open standards.

We're pleased to welcome Ron Bessems as Meta's newly appointed Director. Ron is no stranger to Khronos, having served as Chair of the OpenXR Working Group for years. His experience and leadership make him a natural fit for the Board.

Learn more about Khronos membership

The OpenVX Working Group at Khronos has released two extensions developed specifically to address limitations that have long constrained developers building computer vision and AI applications on modern heterogeneous systems. These new extensions, Target Kernel and Node Command extension, both tackle problems that have grown more acute as SoC architectures have become more complex: efficiently distributing computation across dedicated hardware, and adapting processing pipelines dynamically at runtime without touching the data path. The functionality of both extensions will be included as core features in OpenVX 2.0, the next major API release.