> I wouldn't call the Open Inventor file format public domain unless we've
> seen something from SGI that declares it in the public domain. However, I
> wouldn't expect to get any hassle from SGI just because we display objects
> by reading in files that use the Inventor format.
>
The format has been published. I'm not sure of the official details,
but one of the Inventor team on this list should be able to elaborate...
> Also, I believe that the other platforms will not have Open Inventor until
> late this year. The only company I know of that is working on a port is
> Portable Graphics.
>
Since VRML is a file format, not a development library, I merely offer
Inventor as a suggestion for file format. Inventor doesn't have to be ported
to every platform in order to use the file format. The viewer just needs to be
able to parse it.
> I don't think we need Open Inventor on any platform (although it would sure
> make our programming significantly easier.) I think we should try to use
> the file format for storing the models and add a few "node" types for
> moving around the web.
>
yup, cool.
> I like the file format because it is well documented, fairly complete for
> scene description, plenty of modeling tools, and it has been around for a
> while. I think we could adapt it to our needs. (By the way, as someone
> requested in an earlier note, it does allow both matrices and individual
> elements to describe transformations - translations, rotations, scales, or
> full matrix.)
>
the exact reason why I prefer it over OOGL which seems similar to
Inventor, but not as well-documented or accepted.
Kevin