To do something more practical like “draw a house,”the programmer must break down the object into a series of simple OGL instructions and send them into the engine for rendering. OpenGL (OGL) is a low level application programming interface that takes lists of simple polygons and renders them as quickly as possible. Therefore, the credo was always “ease of use” before “performance”, and soon the tagline “3D programming for humans” was being used widely. If 3D programming were made easier, through the use of an object oriented API, then more people would create 3D applications and SGI would benefit. The strategy was based on the premise that people were not developing enough 3D applications with IRIS GL because it was too time-consuming to do so with the low-level interface provided by IRIS GL. Their goal was to create a toolkit that made developing 3D graphics applications easier to do. The Open Inventor API has been widely used in scientific and engineering visualization systems, with Thermo Scientific Open Inventor still under active development for various applications.Īround 1988–1989, Wei Yen asked Rikk Carey to lead the IRIS Inventor project. Open Inventor was licensed to third-party developers, and in August 2000, it was released under the LGPL open source license by SGI. In the mid-1990s, SGI attempted to merge the two systems into Cosmo 3D and later OpenGL++, but both projects were ultimately discontinued. A different approach, OpenGL Performer, prioritized performance optimization but remained proprietary. OI simplified the creation of 3D applications but faced issues like slower performance and limited file format compatibility.

The project led to the creation of Open Inventor (OI), which provided a common base layer for 3D programming.

In the late 1980s, Wei Yen and Rikk Carey initiated the IRIS Inventor project to create a toolkit for easier 3D graphics application development. Open Inventor exists as both proprietary software and free and open-source software, subject to the requirements of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), version 2.1. Its main goals are better programmer convenience and efficiency. Open Inventor, originally IRIS Inventor, is a C++ object-oriented retained mode 3D graphics toolkit designed by SGI to provide a higher layer of programming for OpenGL.

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