Imagination and Futuremark team up to bring Kanzi UI engine to POWERVR Insiders

Kanzi is a fast and robust solution for the creation and deployment of user interface applications incorporating rich graphics for embedded solutions, and takes full advantage of Imagination’s POWERVR graphics acceleration technologies for both OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1 and OpenVG 1.1. Kanzi is licensed by Futuremark to software developers, as well as to manufacturers of cell phone, automotive and consumer electronics products.

From December, 2009, all registered users of the POWER VR Insider website can apply to receive a fully-featured 30-day trial of the Kanzi engine and SDK.

Kanzi technology is already used by almost every major semiconductor company in the form of Futuremark’s OpenGL® ES benchmarks, software which helps tune the performance of new chips.

As well as effortlessly producing PC-quality advanced 3D graphics in a UI environment, Kanzi also supports the very latest mobile technologies such as touch screen, multi-touch, 3D animation and high resolution displays. Developers using Kanzi benefit from largely eliminating the need to re-create and re-scale the same content separately for each different target device. This leads to radically shorter product development cycles and reduced risk.

Tony King-Smith, VP Marketing, Imagination Technologies says: “Real user interfaces need to be both pragmatic and compelling. Too often we see prototype UIs that may look pretty, but do not deliver a meaningful experience outside of a ‘canned’ demo. The industry needs to move past these ‘toy’ UIs and take this most important part of the mobile experience seriously. You need great tools to deliver a real UI, and Kanzi is a very good example of how to achieve this.”

Tero Sarkkinen, CEO of Futuremark Corporation says: “We are pleased to continue our long association with Imagination and POWERVR by bringing Kanzi to the industry’s largest dedicated mobile and embedded graphics ecosystem. POWERVR Insiders will soon see that Kanzi is an excellent companion to the POWERVR SDK for anyone seeking to create visually compelling and operationally comprehensive user-oriented mobile user interfaces and applications.”

POWERVR Insider, which has its online resources and interactive online developer forum at www.powervrinsider.com, has tripled in numbers over the past 18 months to over 12,000 members, with intake from a broad spectrum that ranges from engineers creating device drivers and verification suites to operating system communities, user interface specialists, and game developers. Imagination’s POWERVR Insider ecosystem is second to none in providing the tools and support essential to leading developers of graphically rich applications.

The POWERVR Insider SDK is developers' preferred development environment for the creation of OpenGL ES 2.0 as well as OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenVG applications. It includes a complete PC-based emulation environment, and is backed by Imagination's unrivalled technical support team. The latest v2.5 release includes OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 SDKs for a number of new phone platforms using POWERVR SGX, including iPhone (running on Mac OS X), Samsung i8910, Sony Ericsson Satio, Nokia N900 and Beagle Board SDKs which give developers access to the world-class POWERVR SGX and MBX toolchains.