Microsoft working on open 3D file format

One of Microsoft’s major initiatives for the future is 3D and mixed reality, with efforts ranging from Paint 3D to HoloLens.

Today Microsoft announced that they are joining the 3D Formats working group at Khronos to collaborate on the development of their new 3D file format, glTF.

The Khronos Group is an American non-profit member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standard, royalty-free application programming interfaces (APIs) for authoring and accelerated playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos is currently in control of Vulkan, OpenGL, WebGL and others.

GL Transmission Format (glTF) is a common, open and interoperable language to describe, edit, and share 3D assets between different applications.  It has been called the JPEG of 3D  and already has wide support by the likes of Oculus, Google, Nvidia and more.

Microsoft will help the effort by contributing open source code and including working on the development of glTF support in the open source frameworks such as BabylonJS.  They will also help get the format supported on as many applications and devices as possible.

Read more about their efforts here.