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iPhone SDK

On October 17, 2007, in an open letter posted to Apple's "Hot News" weblog, Steve Jobs announced that a software development kit (SDK) would be made available to third-party developers in February 2008. The SDK was released on March 6, 2008, and allows developers to make applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, as well as test them in an "iPhone simulator". However, loading an application onto the devices is only possible after paying an iPhone Developer Program fee. Since the release of Xcode 3.1, Xcode is the development environment for the iPhone SDK. iPhone applications, like iPhone OS and Mac OS X, are written in Objective-C.

Developers are able to set any price above a set minimum for their applications to be distributed through the App Store, of which they will receive a 70% share. Alternately, they may opt to release the application for free and need not pay any costs to release or distribute the application except for the membership fee.

Since its release, there has been some controversy regarding the refund policy in the fine print of the Developer Agreement with Apple. According to the agreement that developers must agree to, if someone purchases an app from the app store, 30% of the price goes to Apple, and 70% to the developer. If a refund is granted to the customer (at Apple's discretion), the 30% is returned to the customer from Apple, and 70% from the developer; however, Apple can then take another 30% of the cost from the developer to make up for Apple's loss

For more information visit: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/

 

Open Inventor

OpenGL (OGL) is a low level library that takes lists of simple polygons and renders them as quickly as possible. 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. One problem is that OGL performance is highly sensitive to the way these instructions are sent into the system, requiring the user to know which instructions to send and in which order, and forcing them to carefully cull the data to avoid sending in objects that aren't even visible in the resulting image. For simple programs a tremendous amount of programming has to be done just to get started.

Open Inventor (OI) was written to address this issue, and provide a common base layer to start working with. Objects could be subclassed from a number of pre-rolled shapes like cubes and polygons, and then easily modified into new shapes. The “world” to be drawn was placed in a scene graph run by OI, with the system applying occlusion culling on objects in the graph automatically. OI also included a number of controller objects and systems for applying them to the scene, making common interaction tasks easier.

Finally, OI also supplied a common file format for storing “worlds”, and the code to automatically save or load a world from these files. Basic 3D applications could then be written in a few hundred lines under OI, by tying together portions of the toolkit with “glue” code.
On the downside OI tended to be slower than hand-written code, as 3D tasks are notoriously difficult to make perform well without shuffling the data in the scene graph by hand. Another practical problem was that OI could only be used with its own file format, forcing developers to write converters to and from the internal system.

For more information visit: http://www.vsg3d.com/

 

OpenSG

OpenSG is a scene graph system to create realtime graphics programs, e.g. for virtual reality applications. It is developed following Open Source principles, LGPL licensed, and can be used freely. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X and is based on OpenGL.

Its main features are advanced multithreading and clustering support (with sort-first and sort-last rendering, amongst other techniques), although it is perfectly usable in a single-threaded single-system application as well.

It was started, just like many other systems, at the end of the scenegraph extinction in 1999 when Microsoft and SGI's Fahrenheit graphics API project died. Given that there was no other scene graph system on the market nor on the horizon with the features the authors wanted, they decided to start their own.

OpenSG should not be confused with OpenSceneGraph which is entirely different scene graph API, somewhat similar to OpenGL Performer. Development on both started about the same time, and both chose similar names.

For more information visit: http://www.opensg.org/

 

World Wind

World Wind is a free and open source (released under the NOSA license) virtual globe developed by NASA and the open source community for use on personal computers. Old versions need Microsoft Windows but more recent Java versions are cross platform. The program overlays NASA and USGS satellite imagery, aerial photography, topographic maps and publicly available GIS data on 3D models of the Earth and other planets.

World Wind was released for the first time in 2004 by NASA. The latest version (1.4) developed mainly by open source community members from World Wind Central/Free Earth Foundation had its premiere on February 14, 2007.

Apart from the Earth there are several worlds in World Wind: Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter (with the four Galilean moons of Io, Ganymede, Europa and Callisto) and SDSS (imagery of stars and galactics). All these worlds are available in the File menu.
Users can interact with the selected planet by rotating it, tilting the view, and zooming in and out. Five million placenames, political boundaries, latitude/longitude lines, and other location criteria can be displayed. World Wind provides the ability to browse maps and geospatial data on the internet using the OGC's WMS servers (version 1.4 also uses WFS for downloading placenames), import ESRI shapefiles and kml/kmz files. This is an example of how World Wind allows anyone to deliver their data.
Other features of World Wind include support for .X (DirectX 3D polygon mesh) models and advanced visual effects such as atmospheric scattering or sun shading.

The resolution inside the US is high enough to clearly discern individual buildings, houses, cars (USGS Digital Ortho layer) and even the shadows of people (metropolitan areas in USGS Urban Ortho layer). The resolution outside the US is at least 15 meters per pixel.
Microsoft has allowed World Wind to incorporate Virtual Earth high resolution data for non-commercial use.

World Wind uses digital elevation model (DEM) data collected by NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. This means one can view topographic features such as the Grand Canyon or Mount Everest in three dimensions. In addition, WW has bathymetry data which allows users to see ocean features, such as trenches and ridges, in 3D.

Many people using the applications are adding their own data and making them available through various sources, such as the World Wind Central or blogs mentioned in the link section below.
All images and movies created with World Wind using Blue Marble, Landsat, or USGS public domain data can be freely modified, re-distributed, and used on web sites, even for commercial purposes.

For more information visit: http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/java/

 

Unity

Unity is a multiplatform game development tool, designed from the start to ease creation. The Unity game engine is happily married to the Unity development environment. This tight integration allows the Editor to do everything a published game can do. The simple, visual, and intuitive nature of the Editor makes building games fun again. Unity supports a wide range of publishing platforms, all available at the push of a single button.

Unity's shader system combines ease of use, flexibility and performance. All the built-in shaders integrate perfectly with any type of light, with cookies or without. If that's not enough you can write your own shaders in Unity's powerful ShaderLab language with Cg and GLSL. Whether on an iPhone or an iPod Touch, Unity enables to dazzle your audience with the finest content available in the App Store.

For more information visit: http://unity3d.com/

 
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