Anari from Khronos: Cross-Platform 3D Rendering Engine Open Standard API

Product page is here: https://www.khronos.org/anari

It is basically a render engine to scene representation abstraction API so that multiple rendering frontend can talk to multiple scene backends.

I do take issue with their phrasing of being the “Industry’s first”.

This is only true if you narrow the scope of Industry sufficiently to scientific visualization.

There are other rendering abstraction APIs, like Hydra from Pixar that are also platform independent and very prevalent in the computer graphics industry. There’s been a few more over the years but with less traction. Many of the renderers and partners they mention in the press release also have Hydra versions of their renderers which is what makes it all the more odd.

Either way, there are some nice things here like the C99 use which makes it easier to use in more contexts.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out for use long term