Development of a 3D Graphics Engine Computer Systems Lab, 2006-2007

Computer users are already familiar with the concept of a two-dimensional graphical user interface for manipulating and visualizing data, in the form of text, spreadsheets, and similar documents. Re-cently, graphics hardware capable of rendering 3D user interfaces in real time has permeated the consumer desktop market. Numerous toolkits such as QT, GTK, and Swing exist for the purpose of simpli-fying the development of widget-based 2D graphics applications, but programming in three dimensions poses a bigger problem to develop-ers, as the tools and concepts have been in development for a shorter period of time. Standards essential to 2D application development, such as image formats, have no acceptable 3D parallel (geometry is stored in arbitrary and often poorly documented formats). Tasks that are simple in 2D, such as detecting whether a mouse click causes a but-ton to be pushed down become more complex in 3D. The goal of this project is to simplify the development of three dimensional interface programming, by creating a less complex way to manage the OpenGL render state and by making a unified mesh rendering interface