Khronos Group Goes to Asia

Don't confuse Khronos Group with Kronos Quartet (like I once did). The former is an industry group dedicated to creating open standard APIs to enable the authoring and playback of rich media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. The latter is a string quartet (two violins, a viola, and a cello) with 45 recordings and a Grammy award under its belt.

In what seems like a reversal of roles, the industry group Khronos is going on tour, beginning in February, right after Valentine's Day. The group's Pan Pacific Roadshow, as it's called, comprises "a series of media events, educational sessions, and F2F (face to face) meetings for consortium members and prospective clients."

Between February 14 to March 17, Khronos alumni will hop from airport to airport, covering Taiwan and China. Then between May 10 to December 1, the group will make cameo appearances in China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore. (For the complete event calendar, visit the group's event page here.)

Programmers, engineers, and OEMs of PC and mobile devices are encouraged to attend the DevU sessions on the lineup. Professors, grad students, and researchers are encouraged to sign up for KITE Training Sessions. There are also a few press conferences and Khronos Pavilions, offering you a chance to meet Khronos members and get product demonstrations in a show floor. Guest speakers at the events include Dr. Jon Peddie and Kathleen Maher, analysts from JPR.

Khronos advocates the use of such standards as OpenGL, OpenCL, WebGL, WebCL, COLLADA, and a few others. Khronos members include 3DLabs, Adobe, Google, IBM, MentorGraphics, AMD, Apple, ARM, Intel and NVIDIA.

On the other hand, if you're in the mood for some chamber music (just in time for Valentine's Day), you can check out Kronos Quartet's list of upcoming performances here.