Business Services Industry

Khronos Announces New Members Monotype Imaging, Scaleform, TAT and Accelerated OpenVG Demonstrations

Business Wire, March 22, 2006

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- OpenVG a Catalyst for Widespread Adoption of 2D Vector Graphics Hardware for Mobile; Stimulates Development of Advanced High Quality 2D Applications and User Interfaces

The Khronos(TM) Group is pleased to announce that numerous members are now shipping devices accelerating OpenVG(TM) 1.0, a royalty-free, open standard for low-level 2D vector graphics, and that new members Monotype Imaging, Scaleform and TAT have joined to participate in ongoing development of the API.

OpenVG enables hardware acceleration of libraries such as Flash and SVG, enabling high-quality, anti-aliased, scalable 2D vector graphics on embedded and handheld devices with highly interactive performance and low levels of power consumption. The OpenVG standard has been designed to seamlessly interoperate with OpenGL(R) ES 3D graphics; creating a high-performance, fully integrated 2D and 3D embedded graphics acceleration environment. The OpenVG API specification is available for free download at http://www.khronos.org/openvg/spec.html.> As an open industry standard interface, OpenVG will be an important catalyst for driving widespread adoption of 2D vector graphics hardware for the mobile industry," said Andrzej Mamona, Architect at ATI and the OpenVG Work Group Chair. "This hardware acceleration will stimulate development of a new class of more complex high quality 2D applications and user interfaces."

See Demos of OpenVG by Hybrid Graphics, Imagination Technologies, Mitsubishi, Renesas and Scaleform at GDC on the Khronos Booth #1632 at GDC.

Among many other demos, attendees are invited to see Imagination Technologies' PowerVR MBX combined with the Scaleform VGx vector graphics driver accelerating Flash content using the OpenVG and OpenGL ES APIs.

"Mobile devices need smooth, high-quality 2D vector graphics to enable high-quality user interfaces and ultra-readable text on small screens," says David McBrien, vice president business development, Imagination Technologies. "With support for the OpenVG standard developed by the Khronos Group, PowerVR can provide a low-power consumption solution with a high level of acceleration for 2D graphics such as SVG, Flash, PDF and Postscript. This accelerated, scalable anti-aliased vector graphics solution opens up new possibilities for advanced UI, navigation applications, games, e-books, screensavers and multimedia content."

"Bitboys was the first company to introduce a dedicated hardware vector graphics processor to the wireless market. The OpenVG 1.0 compatible Bitboys G12 is extremely compact in size and offers more than 100-fold rendering performance improvement over software-based solutions. This technology will become a standard in wireless devices over the next few years," said Petri Nordlund, CTO of Bitboys. "You can see our OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics processor Bitboys G40 here at GDC and are invited to see a variety of our OpenVG demos at the Khronos Mobile forum in Tokyo on April 28th."

"HUONE has developed a software implementation of OpenVG API called 'AlexVG engine' and a SVG tiny player running on OpenVG called 'AlexVG t-player,'" said Hwanyong Lee, HUONE (formerly MTIS). "We released an OpenVG API evaluation version for Windows at CeBit 2006 Hannover, and more than 300 evaluation copies of the CD were distributed, and we expect to distribute evaluation version of AlexVG engine running on the OpenVG API via internet in June 2006."

"Hybrid sees OpenVG as a crucial graphics technology for mobile phones and other embedded devices, and Hybrid's OpenVG serves as the acceleration platform for vector-based content formats like SVG and Flash," says Ville Miettinen, CTO of Hybrid Graphics. "Hybrid has been involved with 2D and SVG since 2002, and now see a strong demand for low-level 2D vector graphics standards. Hybrid's commercial OpenVG implementation is already on the market, and our non-commercial version will be made available April, 2006."

"The adoption of OpenVG as the interface to hardware accelerated 2D vector graphics will propel the development of rich graphical content applications and services," said Brad Sipes, VP Operations and CTO of Ikivo. "With over 60 million units deployed, Ikivo is the leading provider for vector graphic software for mobile devices. We are uniquely positioned to bring reach media and graphic services to mobile users and leverage the additional performance capabilities that OpenVG enables. Ikivo Multimedia SVG Player, a W3C SVG 1.2 compliant viewer, may be the world's first commercially available software that integrates to the OpenVG API."

"Monotype Imaging's goal is to help ensure that the Khronos OpenVG(TM) specification will become an efficient hardware acceleration layer for scalable fonts and multilingual text composition, allowing mobile application developers and content creators to benefit from rich graphic capabilities, with the highest quality of scalable, legible text supporting all languages of the world," said Jack Murphy, vice president of research and development at Monotype Imaging Inc.