H3DAPI 2.1 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++.
The most important new feature of H3DAPI 2.1 is improved support for touching dynamic objects (through HAPI). Which made it possible to implement the RigidBodyPhysics component of X3D for H3DAPI 2.1 and actually allow the user to touch the objects in a physics simulation. RigidBodyPhysics is included as a plug-in to H3DViewer that comes with H3DAPI. Other new features are new stereo modes, support for reading files in the nrrd and dicom format, Falcon support on Linux.
H3DViewer is also much improved. New features of H3DViewer includes the possibility to load plug-ins containing additional nodes and a view of the scene graph with possibility to change the values of fields in real time. Geometries can also be exported to the stl format.
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 2.0 upgrades to H3DAPI 2.1.
H3DViewer is a browser that previously only was included with the H3D API package. Now it is released as a stand alone application for Windows and OSX.
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.
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. Register today and login to obtain HAPI here.
MedX3D 1.0.1 and UI 2.0 are two packages which contains extra nodes for H3DAPI. The packages are released with binaries for Windows and as source release which can be used for other operating systems. The packages are meant to function with H3DAPI 2.0 release.
Grab MedX3D 1.0.1 and UI 2.0 in the downloads section.
MedX3D 1.0.1
MedX3D is an implementation of the coming ( not known when ) Volume Rendering Component of the X3D specification. It includes nodes for volume rendering of for example medical data. MedX3D also contains some extra nodes/features not part of the Volume Rendering Component such as an implementation of the Marching Cubes algorithm.
MedX3D has support for reading files of different formats, e.g. raw file format, nrrd file format and DICOM file format.
MedX3D also contains a demo in which it is easy to change properties of the x3d nodes on the fly.
For more information check out the MedX3D entry in the H3D wiki at http://www.h3dapi.org/modules/mediawiki/index.php/MedX3D
UI
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 it is not desired to interact with the virtual world using keyboard and/or mouse.
H3DAPI 2.0 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++.
The improved H3DAPI 2.0 now builds on the haptics engine HAPI (source code available here at H3D.org), which grants users more freedom and control in haptics rendering. Users can now choose from more haptics renderers, including SensAble’s OpenHaptics, Chai3D, and H3D point and sphere-based renderers. Its modular design mean that users of the open source H3DAPI can easily extend the platform, whether it is adding their own rendering algorithms, force effects, or haptic surfaces. The latest version of H3DAPI also comes with more device support, including the range of haptic devices by SensAble, ForceDimension, Novint and MOOG FCS.
H3DAPI 2.0 is also bundled with Cmake now to enable easy installation. H3DAPI runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS.
Our thanks go out to everyone at H3D.org, this is another milestone for the open source haptics community!
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 2.0 beta upgrades to H3DAPI 2.0.