Binomial's Basis Universal To Super-Compress glTF Assets, WebGL Gets New Extensions

With SIGGRAPH 2019 happening next week in LA, The Khronos Group has already kicked off the news cycle by making several announcements from forming a 3D Commerce Initiative Working Group to releasing new WebGL extensions to making use of Binomial's Basis Universal tech for better compression.

On the WebGL front, they are adding parallel shader compilation support (KHR_parallel_shader_compile), multi-draw and instanced multi-draw extensions, RGTC and BPTC compressed texture support, WEBGL_video_texture support, and other new additions in offering more advanced graphics capabilities for the web.

They also announced Binomial, co-owned by Rich Geldreich and Stephanie Hurlburt, is contributing their Basis Universal compression technology to Khronos:

Google and Binomial recently announced that they have partnered to release Binomial’s Basis Universal technology in the form of an open source texture compressor and high-performance transcoder. Basis enables JPG-sized textures that can be transcoded on-the-fly to natively support compressed GPU formats. The transcoder is available in C++ and WebAssembly code for handling ‘.basis’ format textures in native apps and websites.

In parallel, Binomial has contributed the Basis Universal technology to Khronos, and Binomial has been working with the 3D Formats Working Group to create a Universal Texture extension for glTF that packages textures that have been supercompressed with the Basis compressor into a robustly-specified KTX2 container. KTX2 supports streaming and full random-access MIP levels for consistent and reliable cross-vendor generation, validation, and usage of compressed texture assets.

More details on Khronos' SIGGRAPH 2019 happenings via Khronos.org.