# Khronos and buildingSMART form liaison to bridge IFC and glTF standards

> **Key takeaway:** Two major open standards bodies are formally collaborating to improve how structured building data (IFC) flows into interactive 3D pipelines (glTF), with direct implications for open-source CAD, BIM, and visualization tools.

**Published:** 2026-11-02T15:57:00+00:00 
**Source:** Khronos Group (Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenCL) 
**Category:** open-hardware 
**Canonical URL:** https://fosswire.org/news/khronos-and-buildingsmart-form-liaison-to-bridge-ifc-and-glt.html 

## Summary
The Khronos Group and buildingSMART International have established a liaison agreement to advance interoperability between IFC and glTF, the respective open standards for building information exchange and 3D asset transmission. The partnership will focus on shared use cases, technical requirements for visualizing and streaming built-asset models, and improvements to existing IFC-to-glTF conversion workflows.

Both standards are royalty-free and carry ISO certification: IFC as ISO 16739-1:2018 and glTF 2.0 as ISO/IEC 12113:2022. The collaboration is driven by increasing demand for digital twins, AI-driven analytics, web-based applications, and interactive 3D in architecture, engineering, and construction. The organizations plan to produce practical guidance for software developers working at the intersection of BIM data and real-time 3D rendering.

## Standards convergence and technical scope
- **IFC foundation:** buildingSMART's IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) provides structured, semantic building-asset data exchange under ISO 16739-1:2018, carrying information beyond geometry including materials, systems, and relationships.
- **glTF runtime delivery:** Khronos's glTF 2.0 (ISO/IEC 12113:2022) is designed for efficient transmission and loading of 3D scenes, with native support for PBR materials, animations, and streaming—making it suitable for web and real-time applications.
- **Conversion gap:** The liaison will systematically review current IFC-to-glTF conversion approaches, identifying reliability and fidelity limitations when translating parametric BIM data into runtime-optimized 3D representations.
- **Developer guidance:** A planned output is practical documentation for software developers implementing cross-standard pipelines, addressing how to preserve semantic IFC data within glTF's scene graph structure.
- **Emerging use cases:** The technical dialogue explicitly targets AI processing, digital twin synchronization, and web-based interactive visualization of infrastructure models.

## Why it matters
This liaison strengthens the open standards stack for open-source BIM tools like BlenderBIM, FreeCAD, and IfcOpenShell, which currently bear the burden of maintaining custom IFC-to-glTF converters. Improved standardization reduces fragmentation in how Linux-based design and visualization pipelines handle architectural data, and benefits Khronos ecosystem projects including three.js, Blender, and Godot that consume glTF for real-time rendering.