The open source movement, driven by the rapidly growing popularity of Linux, has received another boost with the release of TGSis Open Inventor Toolkit. The Toolkit is based on SGIis recent release of the Open Inventora C++ class library to the Open Source community. According to TGS:
TGS announced itis commitment to the continued advancement and support of the Open Inventor toolkit. On August 15, 2000 SGI released the Open Inventora C++ class library to the Open Source community. Open Inventor is the de facto standard for rapid development of graphics applications and is currently used across a variety of industries including CAD, geoscience, medical and government.
Open Inventor is a full-featured object-oriented framework for building interactive 3D graphics applications. It simplifies the software development process and allows very rapid development of graphics applications. This library is currently used in hundreds of commercial and non-commercial software products.
In Open Inventor, SGI created an amazingly successful 3D graphics API that became tremendously popular on that platform and continues to impress users today with the elegance, productivity and extensibility of its design. TGS licensed the technology, made it available on a wide variety of platforms, and became a primary source for technical support and new feature development, resulting in five major releases over the past six years, including the current v2.6 release. The agreement between SGI and TGS grants TGS the ability to supply a commercial version of the Open Inventor library. TGS will continue to develop and market the library with expanded functionality, offer maintenance for the library and offer professional services relating to the graphics market place. TGS has a significant experience base available on 3D graphics technologies, specifically Open Inventor.
In addition to offering the Open Inventor toolkit across hardware platforms, TGS also offers both an enhanced version of Open Inventor and a set of Open Inventor extension libraries with the current release of Open Inventor 2.6 and 3D-MasterSuite 3.6. The TGS extension libraries include functionality to satisfy requirements for 2D/3D charting and graphing, resolution-independent vector hard copy, VRML97 (2.0) Internet 3D extensions, scientific and engineering 3D data visualization, Large Model Visualization, and Volume rendering. TGS also provides a Java binding for the Open Inventor library. To get a complete list of capabilities available in these products please visit our web site at http://www.tgs.com.
You can find more information at the TGS web site.