Cosmo 3D brings Silicon Graphics' expertise in real-time, interactive 3D graphics to the Internet and the desktop for mainstream Personal Computers and Workstations.


Cosmo^TM 3D is a VRML 2.0 Software Development Kit (SDK) from Silicon Graphics. This is a C++ application programming interface (API) designed to support high performance, interactive, and real-time 3D graphics applications across a range of platforms from PCs to Workstations.

3D Toolkit for VRML 2.0
Cosmo 3D provides all the objects necessary to implement a VRML 2.0 application, including extensible object classes such as routes, fields, and script nodes. Objects and methods are available for reading, writing, and rendering VRML files in addition to the classes necessary for building animation and gaming applications such as morphing nodes which enable Spike's real-time facial animation (see insert).

3D Toolkit for Java^TM and the Internet
Cosmo 3D is the graphics library upon which Java3D^TM, Sun Microsystems' 3D standard for Java, is based. The design of the Java3D API was defined through a joint effort by Apple, Intel, Silicon Graphics, and Sun Microsystems. Java3D provides a thin and efficient binding between a Java application and the natively-compiled Cosmo 3D libraries. The implementation of Java3D is provided by the Java licensees that subscribe to the Java media libraries.

Maintaining 3D applications in either C++ (for maximum performance) or Java (for maximum portability) is made easy by the common foundation between Cosmo 3D and Java3D.

Built on Industry Standards
Cosmo 3D is implemented on top of OpenGL^®, the highest performance, most widely supported graphics API in the computer industry. For unaccelerated, mainstream PC users running Windows^TM 95 or Windows ^TM NT, Cosmo 3D uses Cosmo^TM GL, a complementary special implementation of OpenGL tuned specifically for maximum software-rendering performance on the PC. Cosmo OpenGL for the PC is available directly from Silicon Graphics (See http://www.sgi.com).

Graphics Features

• Rendering of 3D polygons, lines, points, text, and sound
• Retained graphics objects that can be rendered individually or as part of a scene graph
• A scene graph that maintains geometry, graphics state, sound and a transformation hierarchy
• Graphics state management
• Rendering optimizations including level-of-detail (LOD), view frustrum culling
• Synchronization of animations, video textures, audio
• Intersection and pick testing
• Engines that can drive and be driven by object attributes ("fields")
• Class extensibility