Open Inventor

Open Inventor™ is and object-oriented 3D toolkit that facilitates the rendering and the interaction of 3D objects. The Open Inventor based applications optimize the use of powerful graphics hardware with transparency for the developers.

Open Inventor presents a programming model based on a 3D scene database that simplifies programming tasks. The classes included in the library are developed to speed up the programming time of 3D interactive applications.

Open Inventor was initially developed by Silicon Graphics for its high technology systems. Open Inventor has been Open Source years ago.

Main features

Open Inventor key concepts are:

• object-oriented and written in C++

• built on top of OpenGL®

• multi-platform (IRIX, Linux, others platforms also available)

• partially windowing system independent (X11+Motif, with third-party libraries also Win32, Qt/X11-Win-Mac, MFC, GTK, GLUT, etc.)

• introduces a programming model based in a 3D scene database (scenegraph)

• introduces a simple event model for 3D interaction

• provides high performance object picking

• defines a standard file format for 3D data interchange

• provides interaction objects such as handle box and trackball

For further information about Open Inventor, visit the Open Inventor web site.

Open Inventor-based libraries

- SGI Open Inventor, the original version 2.6
- SIM Coin, Coin is an Open Inventor 2.x compatible library
- TGS Open Inventor, TGS is the current official developer of Open Inventor
- SGI-OSS Open Inventor WIN32 Port, a free porting of OSS Open Inventor

Last update of this page: 05-14-2004