Open GL  

Open GL, otherwise known as Open Graphics Library is library of functions that help designers to develop two dimensional and three dimensional images in the arena of computer graphics.

Silicon Graphics Inc. introduced Open GL in 1992, and presently, it is extensively employed in the best areas of computer applications such as flight simulation , CAD, information visualization etc. The Open Graphics library contains as many as 250 function calls that can be utilized for variety of applications.

Plainly speaking, these functions can be considered as very specific application oriented procedures, which determine the characteristics of its outcome. Vendors sometimes create functions or library of functions that go in harmony with Open Graphic Library.

Often, for any vendor’s implementation to be considered as an Open GL implementation, they had to cross several barriers of tests and analysis. For operating systems of Macintosh, Windows, Linux, UNIX etc, implementations of Open GL are available.

It is worthy enough to be noted that, there are software that find it compatible with Open GL implementations.                  

“User friendliness” is the most important entity from user’s perspective, and Open GL offers that. It provides or displays only a single Application User interface. Thereby, it hides all the complexities and functionalities from the user.

Technology similar to Open GL was implemented in the design of the real people featured  in Homepage Video und Animationen.

For Open GL, it doesn’t matter what the underlying hardware is, the hardware has to find compatibility with the complete features of Open GL.

When peeping into the fundamental functioning way of Open GL, it can be said that, it accepts something as input, and a conversion is done with the input to produce the pixel. The input fed, would be lines or points, and the entity that perform this is known as Open GL state machine.

What makes Open GL different from other API s is that, it demands the user or programmer to explain what exactly he wanted to be visualized. Hence it can be termed as a low level application program interface.

Open GL can be liberal in affording the flexibility of programmers when developing algorithms, but concrete knowledge of graphics pipeline is compulsory for them.