Skia and OpenVG

October 7, 2011 in graphics, work experience | No comments

Fig.1.  Can we do this?

After the design of blitter, I took on the job to exploit our SoC’s power to accelerate vector 2D graphics. One idea is to accelerate Skia, a compact open source graphics library used by Android, using OpenVG Graphics core.  I read OpenVG spec and Skia code carefully, trying to understand every detail of OpenVG pipeline and Skia APIs. Admittedly, 2d vector graphics is a very interesting and significant area even though it is likely to be overshadowed by 3D graphics.

It is found that Skia and OpenVG have a lot in common such as primitive drawing, geometrically transform, mask and so on. A simple program was designed to render the classic “tiger head”of OpenVG using Skia APIs. Some Skia examples were also run using OpenVG APIs. I were interested and confident in promoting user experience of Android users by accelerating Skia greatly using OpenVG graphics core. However, this project is suspended because there is still ambiguity in the prospect of Android and we have no enough resource.

Fig.2. Try to render OpenVG “tiger head” using Skia APIs