Khronos Announces New OpenKODE Initiative to Define a Mobile Media Application Development Environment; New Initiative Aims to Enable Portable, High-Performance Mobile Media Applications; Open Call for Industry Participation and Contributions.

LAS VEGAS -- The Khronos(TM) Group is pleased to announce the creation of a new open standard working group: the OpenKODE(TM) (Khronos Open Development Environment) initiative, which intends to create a coherent development and deployment platform to enable and encourage the development of portable, high-performance media applications for mobile handsets. This royalty-free standard will be developed under the proven 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 http://www.khronos.org/members/.

Advanced media applications, including 3D games, are driving 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 is being held back by disruptive 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(R) ES for 3D graphics, OpenMAX(TM) for streaming media, OpenVG(TM) for vector 2D graphics and OpenSL ES(TM) 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 complete, coherently designed, reliably available platform that can be implemented across a wide variety of mobile and embedded devices.

OpenKODE will provide a C-based development environment familiar to many games developers working on PC and console platforms, encouraging cross-platform porting and reducing learning curve for many developers new to the mobile market. OpenKODE will also complement Java-based platforms by enabling the rapid development of C-based libraries, gaming engines and applications that can be invoked from Java applications.

"OpenKODE marks the maturing of the Khronos Group's work from a collection of related APIs, into a complete and coherent development environment designed to provide all the functionality needed by game developers to create fully portable, high-performance mobile applications," said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. "Khronos strongly encourages all members of the mobile industry, particularly software developers and carriers, to become Khronos members to help ensure this initiative meets their technical and business requirements."

About Khronos

The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard APIs such as COLLADA(TM), OpenGL(R) 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, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenMAX and OpenSL ES are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. COLLADA is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. used by permission by Khronos. OpenGL and OpenML are registered trademarks and the OpenGL ES logo is a trademark of Silicon Graphics Inc. used by permission by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.