H3DAPI 2.1.1 is out today! We welcome users, experienced and new to try it out.
Since its introduction to the public in 2005, the H3DAPI has been used by the graphics and haptics community to create or add the simulation of touch to their applications. Built on the industry standards OpenGL and X3D, H3DAPI enables rapid haptics application development using X3D and Python alone. More major projects have been developed by extending H3DAPI capabilities with C++.
This is a bug fix release for various issues discovered in H3DAPI 2.1.
We thank to all users that have contributed with bug reports. Please continue to report problems so they can be fixed for future releases.
We recommended that users of H3DAPI 2.1 upgrades to H3DAPI 2.1.1.
H3DViewer is a browser that previously only was included with the H3D API package released as a stand alone application for Windows.
In H3DViewer X3D scenes with or without H3D content can be loaded and modified at run time through the tree view.
It is also possible for H3DViewer to load plugins which contains custom made H3D nodes. With this distribution a couple of plugins are included to handle graphics and haptics volume rendering, haptic user interface and rigid body physics simulations.
Grab it from the downloads. section.
HAPI is an C++ open source cross-platform haptics library. It is extendable and simple to use. It allows for building applications with haptics cababilities or to add haptics to existing applications. The most important update for this release is the capability to handle dynamic haptic objects which as an example is a useful feature when HAPI is coupled with a physics engine.
This is a bug fix release and HAPI 1.1.1 is binary backwards comptabile with HAPI 1.1.
HAPI comes with these capabilities:
- Haptics device independence. Supports a wide range of haptics devices such as devices from SensAble, ForceDimension, Novint and Moog FCS Robotics.
- Haptics primitives:
Free space haptic effects.
Haptics shapes including sphere and triangles.
Surface/contact handling.
- Haptics rendering algorithms. Choose between different haptics rendering algorithms in order to optimize application performance.
- Extend and customize all the capabilities listed above.
The release can be obtained as a Windows installation package or simply as a compressed source package. Download HAPI here.
UI 2.1.1 is a package which contains extra nodes for H3DAPI. The source code for the package is released. UI is binary distributed with H3DAPI 2.1.1 and H3DViewer 2.1.1 packages for Windows.
The UI package is a collection of haptic user interface nodes that allows the user to create haptic buttons, slider bars etc. This can be useful when creating an haptic application in which the user interface should respond to haptic interaction as well as mouse interaction.
Grab UI from the downloads section.
For more information see the entry about UI in the wiki:
http://www.h3dapi.org/modules/mediawiki/index.php/UI
RigidBodyPhysics 1.0.1 is a package which contains extra nodes for H3DAPI. The source code for the package is released. For Windows users RigidBodyPhysics is binary distributed with H3DAPI 2.1.1 or H3DViewer 2.1.1.
Grab RigidBodyPhysics from the downloads section.
RigidBodyPhysics is an implementation of the Rigid body physics component of the X3D specification. It includes nodes for creating scenes in which geometries acts like rigid bodies. That is objects which are solid, unchangeable sets of mass with velocity.
This is a bug fix release to address issues with compiling with gcc 3.1.1 and on 64 bits system. There are also some minor bug fixes included in the release. The release is binary compatible with RigidBodyPhysics 1.0.0.
RigidBodyPhysics uses a separate engine for calculating interaction between bodies. The physics engines to choose from are ODE, PhysX and Bullet. Full support is however only implemented for ODE in this version of RigidBodyPhysics.
For more information check out the RigidBodyPhysics entry in the H3D wiki at http://www.h3dapi.org/modules/mediawiki/index.php/RigidBodyPhysics