Introduction

Welcome to the Omegalib tutorial. Here will show you how to create, import and display 3D models and use them within the Data Arena. Graphics programming experience is not a prerequisite, although it will help to have some understanding of the graphics pipeline.

Technology stack

The Data Arena synchronizes its displays using a library called Equalizer to replicate low-level graphics commands over a network. However, you will most probably not have to interact with it. The user builds graphical applications by using Omegalib , cyclops and/or OpenSceneGraph. Omegalib is middleware designed to ease the development of applications for virtual reality (VR) and immersive display environments and can integrate a variety of other frameworks. We use OpenSceneGraph, a powerful graphics rendering library, to render our graphics. However, OpenSceneGraph is also a fairly complex library with a steep learning curve.

Therefore, cyclops, a high-level API for osg is used to do common graphic operations in the Data Arena. The Data Arena also provides custom classes to handle standard use-cases and to ease the first steps.