Enables widespread testing of COLLADA import and export functionality for 3D toolchain interoperability; COLLADA adopted by Second Life, Poser Pro and other leading applications; COLLADA fueling content for emerging WebGL standard for 3D on the Web

SAN FRANCISCO — (BUSINESS WIRE) — March 3, 2011 — The Khronos™ Group today announced that it is making the COLLADA™ 1.4 Conformance Test Suite available free of charge to all developers. COLLADA is an open, XML-based industry standard that enables assets to be freely interchanged between 3D authoring applications which can then be mixed and matched in powerful combinations. The COLLADA test suite is a comprehensive set of over 500 detailed tests and a scripted framework that rigorously exercises applications that import and export COLLADA assets to ensure that they can reliably participate in a COLLADA-based toolchain.

Any developer that wishes to test COLLADA import and export functionality can now sign up at no charge to be a COLLADA Implementer to gain access to the source of the COLLADA CTS for running on their own platforms. If an Implementer wishes to state that their tested products have passed the Khronos tests, they must upload successful test results to a provided Khronos server. Developers creating authoring applications are encouraged to become full COLLADA Adopters for a small fee that provides access to a more formalized test review process and permission to use the COLLADA logo and a series of COLLADA Conformance Badges confirming to users the quality of their COLLADA interoperability. More information on COLLADA conformance testing is available www.khronos.org/implementers and www.khronos.org/adopters.

“Smith Micro has a strong interest in COLLADA conformance. Our Poser Pro 2010 product will benefit from the ability to publicly promote conformance to the COLLADA specification,” said Uli Klumpp, Director of Engineering; Productivity & Graphics at Smith Micro. “Access to the conformance test suite also provides us with a valuable tool for test automation, allowing us to expand test coverage greatly with little extra effort.”

“3D assets need to be portable and so the world needs COLLADA! But any digital interchange format needs to be reliably and robustly used by applications to fulfill its full potential, and that is why Khronos has released the extensive COLLADA conformance test suite free of charge. Now the COLLADA community and developers have the tools they need to ensure COLLADA can be imported and exported universally and reliably,” said Neil Trevett, president of Khronos and vice president of Mobile Content at NVIDIA. “COLLADA is also a vital piece in the puzzle of bringing 3D pervasively to the Web and more pieces of that puzzle came together today with the release of WebGL 1.0 specification and the adoption of COLLADA by leading 3D Web applications such as Second Life.”

In September 2010, Linden Lab opened Beta testing for COLLADA mesh import to Second Life, enabling content created in mainstream 3D creation tools, such as Maya or Blender, to be imported directly into Second Life in much the same way that animations and textures can be uploaded.

“As the largest user-created 3D virtual world, Second Life has its own custom content authoring system. The COLLADA standard allows us to open up content creation to the wealth of powerful 3D authoring tools outside the virtual world, bringing a new level of richness to the content in Second Life and offering content creators a new venue for their creations,” said Charlie Hite, Product Owner for Content Creation, Linden Lab. “We will be in the Khronos booth at GDC showing how COLLADA allows import from those tools into Second Life by taking mesh objects out of several tools, exporting them as COLLADA files, and uploading them into Second Life, where we further manipulate them and work collaboratively on them with other people in world.”

The KataSpace open source framework from Katalabs enables browser-based virtual worlds using emerging Web standards like WebGL and WebSockets without requiring proprietary plugins. Katalabs’ OurBricks project enables users to upload and share 3D models and perform simple editing on the site. The content is then cleaned, optimized, normalized and delivered as a ZIP archive that contains the 3D assets as COLLADA documents accessible via a WebGL-accessible URL.

“3D content types have not been natively handled in the browser until WebGL in the same way that video files needed the <video> tag. WebGL is a historic step in bring 3D natively to browsers without plugins,” said Henrik Bennetsen, CEO of Katalabs. “We think everything that has made the Web great has been open and use-case agnostic. We see COLLADA as the way forward for a very Web-like 3D format that complements browser WebGL capability perfectly.”

See Khronos and COLLADA at GDC

Please visit Khronos at booth #1444 at the Game Developer Conference (GDC), March 2-4, 2011 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco to learn more about COLLADA. Khronos is also running a series of developer university sessions on Thursday, March 3rd, in Room 301 in the South Hall: WebGL at 9AM, OpenGL at 10:30AM, Demos at 12 noon, COLLADA at 1:30PM, OpenCL at 3PM, Beer and demos at 4:30PM and finally Mobile APIs at 4:50PM. More details about Khronos activities at GDC can be found at: http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/gdc-2011-san-francisco

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