OGC and Khronos Form a Liaison to Improve Interoperability

10 October, 2018: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, announce a liaison to jointly advance open geospatial standards related to the fields of augmented and virtual reality, distributed simulation, and 3D content services.

As part of the liaison, and through collaborative participation in OGC and Khronos initiatives — such as working groups, committee activities, Innovation Program Initiatives (e.g., Testbeds, Pilots), regional forums, and workshops — the two organizations will work jointly to develop use cases and requirements for open geospatial standards concerning 3D, VR and AR APIs and related graphical representations.

OGC and Khronos will together assess the current state of adopted and de facto standards within the above fields and consider collaborative publication of one or more of those standards, while also identifying any future potential standards that will facilitate the interoperability of relevant data and hardware capabilities for the sharing and analysis of geospatial data.

Further, OGC will adopt published Khronos standards as part of the OGC Standards Baseline where it believes their inclusion to be appropriate, or where Khronos standards are normatively referenced by OGC standards.

OGC Executive Director of the Standards Program, Scott Simmons, commented: “OGC and Khronos share many common members and objectives, and the two organizations have collaborated informally for years. In establishing this relationship, our organizations can more effectively align 3D data and graphic standards to offer developers and users a more concise and consistent set of options for 3D visualization and processing.”

Khronos Group President, Neil Trevett commented: “Khronos greatly values our productive working relationship with OGC, and we are highly motivated by this formal liaison to enable even more effective cooperation. We see strong alignment between the organizations and welcome the opportunity to work together to provide a strong standards-based foundation for OGC to portably access 3D, VR, and AR hardware and assets. Together, we can enable the geospatial community with exciting new capabilities.”

OGC and Khronos have previously worked together on web visualization standards, such as the OGC 3D Portrayal Standard, and Khronos members have actively contributed to the OGC 3D Information Management Domain Working Group and various standards efforts that have emerged from that group.