Software Engineering and OpenVG

Abstract

OpenVG is a recent standard application programming interface for acceleration of vector graphics. It is a royalty-free standard which is targeting embedded systems. Vendors may benefit from adopting a standard, though failing in standardisation comes at a cost. Our goal is to evaluate OpenVG s quality and likeliness of success, which is of interest for both academia and industry. This, research project is a part of the cooperation agreement between NTNU and ARM Norway, Media Processing Divison of ARM®. A literature review identified six key success factors needed to be addressed by OpenVG; performance, portability, conformance, openness, extensibility and ease of adoption. For the purpose of evaluating OpenVG, we developed an application for playing SVG files. The application was ported to an ARM platform and used ARM s OpenVG 1.01 implementation for acceleration of vector graphics. Observations were based on the key success factors and results indicate that the key factors are properly addressed. Our results show that OpenVG inherits high quality from its familiarity to OpenGL. We conclude that it is essential for OpenVG to focus more on ease of adoption in order to gain market shares and succeed. Keywords: evaluating standards, open standards, vector graphics, embedded systems, openvg, khronos