OpenRM - an Open Source Scene Graph API based upon RM Scene Graph

1 March 2000

As announced in this press release, R3vis Corporation has launched OpenRM, an Open Source scene graph API. OpenRM is being released to the Open Source community under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License. While OpenRM is based upon RM Scene Graph, they are different, and R3vis will continue to offer RM Scene Graph as a commercial product. The OpenRM web site located at http://sourceforge.net/projects/openrm/, an Open Source portal sponsored by VA Linux Systems of Sunnyvale, CA. As the opening date draws closer, we will bring an OpenRM email list online. Please check back either here or at the OpenRM site for more information as the date draws closer.

Why OpenRM?

Why would R3vis want to create an Open Source project based upon it's proprietary, commercial technology? The answer is quite simple, really. We believe that it is in the best interest of the graphics community for this kind of technology to be made freely available to developers and vendors alike. The benefits will come in the form of better technology for developers, who will create better technology for users, that will result in smarter kids, and so on. It's like making the food chain more efficient. In making the decision to launch OpenRM, we carefully considered many issues. The results of this effort will appear in this location soon in the form of a white paper.

Relationship Between RM and OpenRM

RM Scene Graph will continue as a commercial product, and evolution of RM and OpenRM will continue more or less in a synchronous fashion. RM will be offered to commercial customers in source-code form, and will contain numerous proprietary extensions that implement specialized features above and beyond those provided by the OpenRM base technology.

How You Can Participate

Prior to the release of the OpenRM source code on 1 March 2000, the best way to participate is to grab the current time-limited evaluation version of RM Scene Graph, including documentation, and begin to familiarize yourself with the system. That way, when you get the source code, you'll already be familiar with the API.

OpenRM will be a well-rounded system when launched, but there will be numerous technical areas where you can contribute. These include:

• APIs from other popular scene graph products

  At the core, most scene graph products are largely equivalent in terms of functionality, but go about expressing that functionality in different ways. Given this large overlap, those familiar with other commercial scene graph APIs can make a huge contribution by creating wrappers for other scene graph products. The wrapper functions in effect mimic the API of the other scene graph APIs, but use OpenRM on the back end to implement the heavy machinery.

  
  
• Applications Developers

  In our experience, we have found that it is the applications that tend to drive technology. Your application might make demands of the system that could cause it to break in unexpected ways.

  
  

In addition to these specific areas, there will likely be many improvements to the fundamental scene graph model that will be proposed by the community. Unlike the development of Linux, there is no clear Posix standard to guide the evolution of a scene graph project. Instead, we will use our best judgement to strike a balance between a focused and feature-full system.