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Khronos at SIGGRAPH 2026: Open Standards Reach New Heights


SIGGRAPH 2026 in Los Angeles delivered a clear snapshot of the future of graphics and spatial computing—and Khronos® was at the center of it. The organization presented more than 20 sessions spanning hands-on courses and in-depth Birds of a Feather (BOF) discussions on neural graphics, XR, 3D assets, rendering, and real-time shading. Wednesday, July 22 served as the dedicated Khronos Developer Day, with status updates from the Vulkan®, glTF™, WebGL™/WebGPU, OpenXR™, ANARI™, and Slang™ Working Groups, plus the Machine Learning Council, followed by a networking reception for members and guests.

More Content Than Ever Before

Between the Khronos Developer Day, the glTF Ecosystem Forum, and a full slate of BOF sessions at the Los Angeles Convention Center and JW Marriott, Khronos contributed more content to this year’s event than at any previous SIGGRAPH. The agenda ranged from foundational courses (A Step-by-step Intro to ANARI and How to Write a Vulkan Application in 2026) to deep technical BOFs on glTF 2.1, OpenXR’s spatial-computing roadmap, AI-powered standards, and machine learning in real-time graphics.

The breadth reflected a market that has fully embraced open standards as the connective tissue for graphics, XR, neural rendering, and parallel computing.

Slang's Moment Arrived

Strong interest in the open-source shading language Slang was evident throughout SIGGRAPH. Slang was featured in three courses, including the hands-on Introduction to Slang: The Next-Generation Shading Language and Hands-On Machine Learning with Slang: Building High-Performance GPU Inference Pipelines (both on Tuesday), as well as the Sunday course Introduction to Neural Shading. Slang also appeared in the High-Performance Graphics talk on neural.slang, the Real-Time Shading BOF, a preview during Khronos Fast Forward, an NVIDIA RTX Rendering Day session, and its own Wednesday BOF, Slang in Action: Modern Shading for Graphics, Compute, and AI. Across these sessions, developers explored how Slang helps manage growing shader complexity while delivering high performance for graphics, compute, and AI workloads across GPUs and platforms.

Shannon Woods of NVIDIA presents to a packed room during the Khronos Fast Forward BOF at SIGGRAPH 2026 in Los Angeles.

glTF Interactivity Arrives

One of the week’s biggest storylines broke just before the show and fueled conversation all week: the KHR_interactivity extension for glTF 2.0 was submitted for ratification. The extension lets creators embed portable, self-contained interactive behaviors, expressed as behavior graphs, directly inside a glTF asset, so developers no longer need to re-implement interactivity for every platform and application. Khronos Group President Neil Trevett called it a critical step on glTF’s path from 3D asset format to spatial-experience building block: assets that are no longer just things you look at, but experiences you can use.

Adoption is already real. Babylon.js supports playback of interactive glTF files; Needle Tools has helped to develop a UnityGLTF Exporter that lets creators export interactive content straight from Unity’s Visual Scripting graph, and has KHR_interactivity and related extensions on the Needle Engine roadmap; Magic Leap has a completed runtime; and Google’s Android XR platform will support playback through the Jetpack XR SDK. GamesBeat’s Dean Takahashi covered the announcement in depth, and attendees carried the conversation into Thursday’s glTF Ecosystem Forum. Read the full GamesBeat coverage here.

Several Khronos sessions at SIGGRAPH 2026 highlighted rapid progress in Gaussian splatting and volumetric video. The From Splats to Worlds: Advanced 3DGS Applications BOF explored how 3D Gaussian splatting is evolving into a foundation for real-time rendering, volumetric media, and spatial computing, covering topics such as compression, animated splats, and world models. Related discussions in the glTF and 3D Assets sessions addressed the new Gaussian Splatting extension for glTF, now at release-candidate stage, along with the formation of a Volumetric Media Subgroup focused on standardizing the capture, storage, and playback of volumetric video. Together these sessions underscored growing industry momentum toward open, interoperable representations for high-fidelity real-world and dynamic 3D content.

Real-Time Shading, Past, Present, and Future

Ken Perlin’s talk on the birth of procedural shaders during the Real-Time Shading BOF, which covered shading languages including GLSL, HLSL, SPIR-V™, Slang, WGSL and others, drew a strong audience and offered a valuable historical perspective on the origins of modern shading. Speaking about his work at Magi in 1984, Perlin recounted the early experiments that led to the first procedural shading techniques and the conceptual foundations of shading languages. The session connected today’s sophisticated real-time and neural shading systems back to those pioneering ideas, giving attendees a clear view of how far the field has come and how those early innovations still shape current practice.

Ken Perlin of NYU describes the history of shaders and shading languages during his talk The Birth of Procedural Shaders in the Khronos Real-Time Shading BOF at SIGGRAPH 2026 in Los Angeles.

During the Real-Time Shading BOF, Khronos shared highlights from the 2026 Shader Ecosystem Survey, which gathered responses from more than 400 developers. Shader debugging and profiling stood out as the clear top pain point, selected by 53% of respondents.

Networking Reception Caps Khronos Developer Day

Wednesday evening's Khronos Networking Reception at the JW Marriott Los Angeles L.A. LIVE capped a full day of BOFs with drinks, food, and genuinely great conversation. Presenters, Working Group leaders, member companies, and fellow SIGGRAPH attendees mixed late into the evening, swapping notes and catching up. Thank you to sponsors LunarG, Cesium, and NVIDIA for helping make the evening possible. It is always the conversations that happen after the formal sessions end that stick with people, and this year's reception delivered plenty of them.

Catch the Sessions On Demand

Missed a session, or want to revisit one? Every Khronos presentation from SIGGRAPH 2026 is now available to watch, including the Khronos Fast Forward kickoff and the full run of BOFs and courses. Watch all the SIGGRAPH 2026 presentations here.

Khronos News Highlights from SIGGRAPH

Khronos has had a recent wave of announcements leading into and during SIGGRAPH that showed just how much ground Khronos standards continue to cover:

  • glTF 2.1 preview was shared, delivering native multi-asset scene support and optimized streaming while staying fully backward compatible with glTF 2.0.
  • A Gaussian Splatting extension for glTF hit release candidate status, bringing production-ready, photorealistic real-world capture into the glTF ecosystem.
  • Khronos sponsored a free, open-source glTF importer/exporter for Autodesk 3ds Max, giving artists a full round-trip workflow without third-party converters. The timing lined up with a broader Autodesk push into Gaussian splat workflows: a new Points object type that lets artists convert a Gaussian Splat into an editable point object, complete with per-point color and harmonic data, deformation modifiers, and Arnold-powered rendering and relighting. It's a separate release from the Khronos-sponsored glTF plugin, but it's the same story from a different angle: splats are becoming first-class, editable scene data across the DCC ecosystem, not just a viewer format. Read Digital Production's full breakdown here.
  • OpenXR introduced tiered adopter fees so that subscription and renewal fees now scale across employee-count tiers, with discounted rates for Khronos Members and possible waivers for eligible nonprofit open-source implementers, while the conformance bar itself stays exactly where it was. As the Khronos OpenXR Working Group put it, "the conformance bar is not being lowered. Access to that bar is being broadened." Read GameDev.net's coverage here.
  • Vulkanised and the Real-Time Shading Symposium both announced 2027 dates, a shared venue, and calls for submissions: Vulkanised returns to Kortrijk, Belgium, February 8–10, with the Real-Time Shading Symposium following February 11–12, both hosted at Howest University. Real-Time Rendering's Eric Haines flagged both events to his readers, noting that smaller, focused symposia like these are worth the trip precisely because everyone in the room is working on the same problems you are, a nice contrast to the scale of SIGGRAPH itself. Read the Real-Time Rendering post here.
  • Khronos published its 2026 Real-Time Shading Ecosystem Survey, with shader debugging and profiling named the top pain point by more than half of the 400+ developers surveyed. Since SIGGRAPH, Khronos has been looking at ways to help organize the community of people that have expressed interest in helping develop solutions in this area.
  • A new Volumetric Media Subgroup was formed within the glTF Working Group to standardize capture, storage, and playback of 3D volumetric video.
  • Vulkan Ray Tracing began deprecating host-side acceleration structure builds, consolidating the API around a modern, device-address-based path.
  • OpenCL 3.1 shipped, elevating widely used features into the core spec and mandating SPIR-V ingestion.
  • The ANARI SDK reached v0.16.0, with a new Conformance Test Suite and expanded tooling.

    • For the full rundown, see all the Khronos SIGGRAPH 2026 highlights here.