"A project launched by Sony to expedite the porting of "digital assets" used by game developers--such as 3D scenes, territories, and animated objects--is being integrated with the principal open-license graphics platform for embedded systems. The result may be that current PlayStation 2 and future PlayStation 3 games may soon appear on next-generation cell phones and handheld devices.

At SIGGRAPH 2005 yesterday, the Khronos Group which manages the OpenGL ES graphics platform announced its alliance with Sony's Collabra project, which produces an XML schema that enables the sharing of high-capacity digital assets across multiple development platforms. During yesterday's announcement, Khronos described Collada as "a vital bridge between modelers and run-time engines," which means that games developers who build their prototypes around the highest-performance platform available--in Sony's models, PlayStation 3--can easily transport their development data to compilers and development systems that render the same games on lower-performance platforms.

As Neil Trevett, chairman of Khronos' OpenGL ES working group, and vice president for embedded content at NVIDIA, told Tom's Hardware Guide, "It's a great benefit to the ISVs if every cell phone in the world supports the same graphics API--it means it's a huge catalyst to growing the market for good 3D applications. That, in turn, drives the demand for handsets with good 3D acceleration, and you get a virtuous upward spiral." OpenGL ES 2.0 is the new version of the cross-platform graphics API for embedded systems, based on the existing OpenGL platform in use in desktop operating systems since 1992. Sony has been an OpenGL supporter since its inception, and made overtures that it would be supporting OpenGL ES 2.0 in PS3 consoles as early as last March." [more]