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For my family and all my best friends.
Dave Durnil
For Lissa, whom I ignored when she told me to stop
writing these damn books.
Dave Astle
Foreword
ou say you want a revolution? Well, sometimes the smallest things can create the
biggest changes. OpenGL ES originated that way—in a modest 3Dlabs project in
Y2001 that sought to define a standardized subset of OpenGL for a range of embed-
ded systems. It soon became clear that there was a widespread industry desire for a small
footprint, cross platform API with excellent 2D and 3D functionality, particularly as 3D
silicon was rapidly ing both more capable and significantly cheaper, but such an
API simply didn’t exist in 2001.
As interest quickly grew around 3Dlabs’ idea, the search began for a standards body able
to create a 3D graphics API for embedded systems that leveraged the proven strengths of
OpenGL—an API that has been used by a huge range of applications from games to CAD
systems on a wide variety of workstations and PCs. With the support of the OpenGL
Architecture Board, the industry body responsible for evolving OpenGL for 10 years,
3Dlabs took the idea of defining a subset of OpenGL to the Khronos Group—an open
standards consortium working on OpenGL-related standards. Khronos recognized the
opportunity and began anize to undertake this new project.
Then things started getting really interesting.
At that time, the cell phone industry was also searching for a graphics API to enable the
market for 3D gaming on handsets. An early indication of how fast things were about to
start developing occurred when Symbian arranged an industry-wide meeting in April
2002, and in a single day, the decision was made to adopt the embryonic OpenGL ES as
that standard.
So a small physical platform, the cell phone, began to provide a mercial momen-
tum that propelled the nascent OpenGL ES into the fas