Silicon Graphics Inc has announced a couple of new libraries for its Cosmos development tools suite in the shape of Cosmo 3D, a graphics tool kit and Cosmo GL, a version of its OpenGL three-dimensional graphics application programming interface for personal computers to run modeling systems and games without any additional graphics hardware. Written in C++, the Cosmo 3D tool kit supports more than 30 graphics file formats, including Virtual Reality Modelling Language 2.0, and includes Java bindings to enable Java applications to use it. Silicon Graphics has been working with Sun Microsystems Inc’s JavaSoft division on three-dimensional rendering in Java, and Silicon Graphics will propose Cosmo 3D as synonymous with what three-dimensional rendering should look like when called by a Java applications. It incorporates the scene graph data structure technology with geometric morphing, three-dimensional audio and texture mapping used in Silicon Graphics’s Inventor and Performer products which enables not only three-dimensional graphics but other media types including sound to be stored, and more importantly, co-ordinated, so that the right sound goes with the right graphics. Cosmo GL is what Silicon Graphics calls a full implementation of its OpenGL application programming interface, a lower-level interface for graphics rendering, according to John Schimpf, OpenGL product manager. He claims it is a high-performance version of OpenGL for personal computers, rather than specifically a Web technology, which makes a change. Both products are both for Silicon Graphics’s and other companies’ development purposes and are aimed at both Web and high-end standalone graphics applications that the Web is still some way off supporting. Cosmo GL will be downloadable for free from www.sgi.com from the start of next month for Windows95 and Windows NT, while Cosmo 3D goes into beta test for all system this fall; no prices were given.
