SO3 Engine, a new 3D engine for the SCOL community

I-Maginer’s team is pleased to introduce to the SCOL community (http://www.scolring.org), it’s projects concerning the development of the technology.

For some time (since November 2008), we have been actively working on the integration of the open source 3D engine Ogre (http://www.ogre3d.org).

Several reasons motivated this choice:
First, we wanted to enable SCOL developers to create high quality 3D environments in line with current developments of 3D engines. Indeed, the current engine ZooEngine had changed little since 2002 and was somewhat outdated.
Rather than reinventing the wheel it was better to focus on developing a new 3D engine incorporating powerful features. That is what motivated our choice of Ogre 3D.

This development allows a better compatibility, a higher rendering quality and higher performances of 3D in SCOL.

The new plugin (dll) for SCOL / Ogre interfacing is the SO3Engine.

Its purpose is to allow a high-level use of the Ogre 3D engine in order to combine these new features with the existing SCOL API.
This project is very promising. It aims to revive the interest of 3D developers to SCOL technology and to add a more computer graphic oriented community.

We will deliver to the SCOL community these developments during the month of April, under Open Source license : the SO3Engine, the Ogre (v1.6.1)redistributable and documentation.

In addition, we will deliver our SCOL developments that will allow anyone to use this new API: an interactive 3d scene editor (offline and mono-user at first). This application, named OpenSpace 3D, will allow you to edit a 3d ogre / Scol scene and to implement features

OpenSpace3D’s aim is to help develop new 3D environments in the field of collaborative work (distant meetings, webconferences), training (virtual classroom, learning and serious games), simulation, innovation, e-commerce ( virtual shops and malls), social networks for expression and sharing (personal 3D spaces) or massively multiuser games (MMOG)… for both B2B and B2C uses based on 3D and real-time collaboration.

These developments set a new direction for I-Maginer that is now positioned in the field of integration and development of open source technologies as an Open Source computing service company. The open source platform OpenSpace3D will spearhead.
More to come really soon.