Open Inventor® from Mercury is the most widely used object-oriented, cross-platform 3D graphics API for C++ and Java developers. The new Open Inventor takes advantage of technological advances to better meet the needs of our customers. With a full compliment of robust components for rapid application development, Open Inventor has become an even more powerful graphic display system for real-time 3D visualization.

Open Inventor allows developers to increase productivity by reducing time to market and optimizing their development costs and resources. Open Inventor gives the developer a choice of development language, either C++ of Java, and also provides the flexibility of running the developed application on many different platforms. This cross-platform capability makes Open Inventor a fast, flexible, and high performing API for developing interactive, object-oriented 3D applications.

Here are some of the advantages and benefit of using Open Inventor by Mercury

Open Inventor by Mercury continues to deliver fast and flexible object oriented 3D graphics tools to serve the application developers marketplace. Open Inventor dramatically simplifies the design, development, deployment, and maintenance of scalable and interactive 3D applications. Some of the specific markets Mercury has targeted with the new release of Open Inventor are Oil & Gas and Geosciences, Visual Simulation, CAD/CAM/CAE and 3D Immersive VR covering all those markets. In Malaysian context, we at My-Partners have been distributing Open Inventor to major academic institution for education and training purposes. Below are some sample of application areas for Open Inventor;

• Business Graphics
• Cartography
• Chemistry
• Engineering
• Visual Reality and VRML
• AEC and Simulations
• Mechanical CAE and CAD
• Architectural Design
• Medical and Scientific Imaging
• Geophysical Science
• Scientific Data Visualization
• Animation

Open Inventor is the de facto standard for development of cross-platform (IRIX, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Linux, and Windows) 3D graphics applications in C++ and Java. It is a powerful object-oriented toolkit with over 450 classes and an intuitive and easy-to-use programming interface that allows for rapid prototyping and development of graphics applications.

Open Inventor's extensible architecture allows developers to add entirely new objects. Since Open Inventor was designed specifically to use OpenGL® for graphics rendering, it is highly optimized to take advantage of OpenGL accelerators. Open Inventor provides the power and functionality of OpenGL at an object-oriented level. Instead of writing tedious low-level calls to specify vertices, you describe your objects in a scene hierarchy.

Open Inventor's optimized rendering automatically takes advantage of OpenGL features like display lists, texture objects, and vertex arrays. Open Inventor is a very high-level API, reducing the programming time required of low-level APIs by over 10 times - and resulting in products that can be completed in much less time with much more sophisticated capabilities.

Open Inventor supports a large number of 3D graphics features such as :

• Advanced Multi-Pipe Capabilities with Multi-pipe Extension
• Volume Rendeing and Volume Viz
• Large Model Visualization
• Ability to handle Large Data Sets
• Real Time Interaction
• Collision Detection
• HTML Image Maps
• Data Analysis
• Multithreading

 Download Open Inventor Brochure