COLLADA Joins Khronos Group to Create 3D Authoring Open Standard; Project Initiated by Sony Computer Entertainment for PLAYSTATION(R)3 is now Open for Participation by all Khronos Members; Encourages Strong Tool Chain for all OpenGL ES Platforms.

LOS ANGELES -- The Khronos(TM) Group is pleased to announce that the COLLADA(TM) project has elected to join Khronos to further their work as an open standard under Khronos' open participation process and royalty-free intellectual property (IP) framework. Initiated by Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) COLLADA stands for "COLLAborative Design Activity" and 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 extremely powerful tool chains. Numerous companies have supported and developed COLLADA including 3Dlabs, Alias, Aegia, Autodesk, ATI, Havok, NVIDIA and Softimage.

"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. "SCEI remains fully committed to COLLADA: it forms a key part of the PLAYSTATION3 tools strategy. SCEI has become a Khronos Promoter so that we can fully support COLLADA, OpenGL(R) ES and other Khronos standards."

COLLADA supports all the features that modern 3D interactive authoring applications need to exchange and fully preserve asset data and its feature set is expanding to incorporate technologies such as packaging programmable shader effects and controlling real-time physics engines. This new standard will enable powerful 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.

"By designing authoring and acceleration standards in one organization, Khronos can ensure that COLLADA will enable powerful tool stacks for compelling 3D content across all OpenGL ES delivery platforms," said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, chairman of the OpenGL ES Working Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. "The availability of the same API across platforms from cell phones to high-performance consoles, combined with state-of-the-art authoring tools, makes OpenGL ES an attractive target for ISV development."

"Alias supports COLLADA joining Khronos and we will be integrating COLLADA into our FBX SDK architecture," said Michel Besner, vice president business development, emerging markets, Alias. "Alias and Khronos share the same vision of making 3D graphics capabilities available any time, any where and we look forward to helping to make that vision come true."

"Autodesk is thrilled that COLLADA is joining the Khronos Group," said Marc Petit, vice president, Autodesk Media & Entertainment, "We thank Sony Computer Entertainment for its leadership in creating a much needed 3D authoring data exchange solution. COLLADA brings definitive efficiencies to customers who implement pipelines featuring both 3ds max and games middleware solutions such as the Unreal Engine from Epic Games. We are looking forward to keep on working actively within the Khronos Group on the development of COLLADA."

"Softimage intends to join Khronos and continue to play a key role in the development and deployment of this important authoring standard," said Marc Stevens, director of research & development and product management at Softimage Co., a subsidiary of Avid Technology, Inc. "Since the beginning of the initiative, Softimage has been a strong supporter of COLLADA as a technology to enable our tools to develop content for a wide variety of platforms -- and so we welcome the broad participation and guaranteed long-term standards availability that Khronos brings to the 3D industry."

Presentations at SIGGRAPH 2005

COLLADA: An open Digital Asset Exchange Schema for the Interactive 3D Industry

Wednesday August 3rd, 1-3 p.m. Hall J, Room 1. More information at: http://www.siggraph.org/s2005/main.php?f=conference&p=exhibitor&s= index (Due to its length, this URL may need to be copied/pasted into your Internet browser's address field. Remove the extra space if one exists.)

OpenGL ES: "Birds of a Feather" Meeting

Tuesday August 2nd, 2-4 p.m. Manhattan C, Sheraton Downtown 711 S Hope St, Los Angeles. More information at: http://www.khronos.org/news/events/.

About Khronos

The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as COLLADA, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX(TM), OpenVG(TM), OpenSL ES(TM) and OpenML(TM) to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. Please go to www.khronos.org for more information.

Khronos, OpenVG, OpenMAX and OpenSL ES are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. PlayStation is a registered trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. COLLADA is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. OpenGL and OpenML are registered trademarks and the OpenGL ES logo is a trademark of Silicon Graphics Inc. used by permission by Khronos. Avid and Softimage are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Avid Technology, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.