Is Open Inventor a format for 3D data?

Open Inventor defines a powerful, extensible format for 3D objects and scenes. However, Open Inventor is more than a 3D object file format; it is a complete toolkit for writing interactive, 3D applications.

Inventor is an API for programmers writing 3D applications, it is not a 3D modeling tool.

Yes and no. Open Inventor contains mostly 3D objects. There is little in the way of conventional user interface objects such as buttons, dialogs, and menus. However, Open Inventor includes a full-fledged event model, a framework designed for 2D or 3D user interaction, and some manipulator objects for 3D user interface building. Note that the Inventor Xt Component and Utility Library includes some traditional 2D user interface widgets.

Sometimes. Note that few OpenGL programs achieve peak graphics performance. This is because most applications have natural application overhead, and also because many programmers lack a thorough understanding of the details and intricacies of OpenGL. If you are writing a simple display-only, immediate-mode OpenGL program, then it will run faster using straight OpenGL, but not much. However, if your program has scene traversal, interactivity, picking, bounding box calculations, and other object space tasks, then Open Inventor will perform better for you. This is because Open Inventor is tuned to make optimal use of OpenGL. Furthermore, Open Inventor supports render caching which results in peak OpenGL performance in most cases.

Linux (glibc 2.x) or IRIX, X11R6, Motif, C++ compiler and OpenGL.

Currently only the C++ bindings are available in the open source version. The IRIX version has both C and C++ bindings.

This version of Open Inventor has been tested on SGI's Visual Workstations (230,330,550) running Linux and on our IRIX workstations.

Version 2.1.6.