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The OpenSG® Scenegraph

To program current graphics cards a well-defined, hardware-independent API is necessary. For most people, this is OpenGL. The problem with OpenGL is that it's designed to be a very thin on top of the graphics hardware, and therefore programming graphics in OpenGL is comparable to programming other programs in assembly language: very powerful, gives the best performance possible when done right, horrible when done wrong, and generally very painful to deal with. A higher level approach, comparable to using an object-oriented language like C++ or Java, is using a scenegraph, which represents the whole scene as a tree of different kinds of nodes and hides all the nitty gritty OpenGL details from the. My scenegraph is OpenSG®.

(All images © by Fraunhofer IGD) Scenegraphs have been around for a long time. But most of them have not evolved very much and don't use current developments in general and graphics hardware as well as programming languages. OpenSG® tries to address three core aspects:

• Multithreading
• Extensibility through Reflection
• Extensibility towards new graphics features and algorithms

There is more info on the OpenSG® website and in the papers.

Started:

2000-10-01

Homepage:

www.opensg.org

Past Students:

Alex Allen

Papers:

Reiners, Dirk Herausforderungen an moderne Szenengraphsysteme am Beispiel OpenSG in Informatik-Spektrum
Reiners, Dirk OpenSG: A Scene Graph System for Flexible and Efficient Realtime Rendering for Virtual and Augmented Reality Applications in Unset
Roth, Marcus Integration paralleler Rendering-Verfahren fuer lose gekoppelte Systeme mit OpenSG in OpenSG 2002 Workshop
Reiners, Dirk OpenSG: A scene graph system for flexible and efficient realtime rendering for virtual and augmented reality applications in Unset

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