Re: LANG: OOGL (was Re: LANG: Re: scalability (VRML))

John W. Barrus (barrus@merl.com)
Mon, 20 Jun 1994 07:47:54 -0400


Kevin Goldsmith wrote:

>Open Inventor vs. OOGL
>
> There are more tools for Inventor and more people using it. It is not
>as consise, but we could agree on a subset of it to use. The Inventor file
>format is public domain (ie: OPEN Inventor). It is available on many platforms
>and it is available in both binary and ascii file formats

I wouldn't call the Open Inventor file format public domain unless we've
seen something from SGI that declares it in the public domain. However, I
wouldn't expect to get any hassle from SGI just because we display objects
by reading in files that use the Inventor format.

Also, I believe that the other platforms will not have Open Inventor until
late this year. The only company I know of that is working on a port is
Portable Graphics.

I don't think we need Open Inventor on any platform (although it would sure
make our programming significantly easier.) I think we should try to use
the file format for storing the models and add a few "node" types for
moving around the web.

I like the file format because it is well documented, fairly complete for
scene description, plenty of modeling tools, and it has been around for a
while. I think we could adapt it to our needs. (By the way, as someone
requested in an earlier note, it does allow both matrices and individual
elements to describe transformations - translations, rotations, scales, or
full matrix.)

John B.

-------------------------

John Barrus barrus@merl.com

Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories 617.621.7535 (VOICE)
201 Broadway 617.621.7550 (FAX)
Cambridge, MA 02139