OpenFrames

An API that provides real-time interactive 3D graphics for scientific simulations.

Copyright 2013 Ravishankar Mathur
OpenFrames is distributed under the Apache v2 License. See the LICENSE file for details.

OpenFrames is an Application Programming Interface (API) that provides the ability to add interactive 3D graphics to any application. This readme file provides a quick and dirty introduction to OpenFrames.

As a preface, it should be noted that OpenFrames is based on several existing APIs. The major one is OpenGL, which is a graphics API included with all mainstream operating systems and supported by all mainstream graphics hardware. Other API used is OpenSceneGraph (explained shortly). Note that the "Open" prefix in these APIs means that they are Open Source. An Open Source API is one for which the source code is freely available (with licensing restrictions) to anyone. Read more about the Open Source initiative at http://www.opensource.org.

OpenSceneGraph is an API that provides cross-platform scene graph management. A scene graph is a concept that groups objects with similar characteristics together. This grouping then enables operations to be quickly applied to groups of objects. Read more about it at http://www.openscenegraph.org.

Instructions to build and install OpenFrames are available in the INSTALL file at the root of the source code distribution.