SYSTEMS

Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. announced at SIGGRAPH 2004, version 5.0 of Open Inventor, the most widely used object-oriented, cross-platform three-dimensional (3D) graphics application programming interface (API) for C++ and Java developers. Open Inventor 5.0 offers several new robust components for rapid application development, making it a more powerful graphic display system for real-time, 3D visualization. "Open Inventor has become the de facto standard for development of cross-platform (Windows, UNIX, Linux) 3D graphics applications in C++ and Java," said Didier Thibaud, vice president and general manager, Imaging and Visualization Solutions, Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. "Version 5.0 from Mercury enables developers to increase productivity by reducing time to market and optimizing their development costs and resources." Version 5.0 of Open Inventor has many added features that broaden its functionality, including more than 1,000 classes and an intuitive, easy-to-use programming interface that allows for rapid prototyping and development of graphics applications. Major enhancements include: New Platforms Apple Macintosh (Mac OS 10.3) AMD64/EM64T machines (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) New Features Support for programmable shaders (ARB, Cg, and GLSL) OpenGL 1.5 texture extensions (plus multi-texture, etc.) Direct import of OpenFlight files (for vis-sim applications) Improved transparency (by sorting triangles) Support for X3D nodes, including 2D geometry nodes FastEdit mode (for small changes in a big scene) Interactive scene graph editing tool ("ivTune") MeshViz (formerly DataViz) Extension Support for data-per-cell (instead of per-vertex) VolumeViz Extension Interactive navigation of very large data sets (LDM) HardCopy Extension Very fast hidden surface removal for large scenes MultiPipe Extension 3D user interface toolkit for immersive environments Open Inventor has an extensible architecture that allows developers to add their own functionality. Mercury is offering extensions to the toolkit that will allow the developer to "mix and match" the extensions as needed, and create a toolkit that is customized to their specifications. The Mercury TGS Series™ includes Open Inventor and amira®, each designed specifically to use OpenGL for graphics rendering and to enable the power and functionality of OpenGL at an object-oriented level. Mercury plans to demonstrate the TGS Series products in booth #1930 on a number of displays and platforms.