  As a modern development environment, VIZARD combines the best of high-level and low-level APIs. Examples of VIZARD’s high-level interfaces include immediate connectivity to visualization display and tracking technologies, full support for GUI elements such as text, buttons, sliders, etc.; rich support for deformable mesh avatars and animation; synchronized cluster networks, and import support for nearly all 3D model, image; and multimedia file formats. Examples of VIZARD’s low-level interfaces include our plug-in architecture for constructing your own sensor and custom drawable (OpenGL compliant) modules and direct access to VIZARD’s scenegraph for extreme control over the render cycle. As important as all the unique features VIZARD provides is the core upon which VIZARD:C++ is built, namely the widely popular and extremely powerful OpenSceneGraph API, bringing the power of open source community to a commercially supported product. |
Key Features - Build worlds instantly
- Complete large projects quickly
- Import 3D and multimedia resources
- Directly connect to VR hardware
- Populate worlds with built-in avatars
- Leverage the power & simplicity of Python
- Free API to create custom effects
- Control for precise realtime projects
- Reap benefits of 10 yr old user community
Key reasons why developers use VIZARD - Performance
The VIZARD rendering core is a high-performance graphics engine developed in C/C++ using the latest OpenGL extensions. You get to develop in Python while VIZARD automatically transforms your project into a VIZARD byte code abstraction layer (LAXMI) that efficiently directs the rendering core. Graphics performance is maximized through view frustum culling and state sorting of properties such as textures and materials. As GPU's get faster and faster, LAXMI allows your application to take full advantage of advances in graphics pipeline architecture. - Simplicity
Vizard is both an integrated development environment (IDE) and high-level graphics library seamlessly blended into the Python programming language. Our IDE simplifies the tasks of maintaining your digital assets, provides real-time viewing and adjustment of your scenes, and gives you sophisticated tools for debugging your scripts. Most important, however, is the library’s power at encapsulating many complex graphics or hardware interface issues (literally thousands of lines of OpenGL code) into a single line of VIZARD Python script code. - Community
VIZARD has been used by developers of virtual reality applications and scientific visualization for over a decade. This track record means you can count on VIZARD’s features to be both rich and robust, and able to meet the challenges of the real-time VR community. Given the size of the Vizard community, you’ll be able to find help when you need it and be assured you’re investing in a long-term platform.   
VIZARD Compare Editions  VIZARD Lite Edition
Includes integrated development environment, community access (forum), avatar support, and all VR components. This edition is perfectly suitable for demonstrations, testing, and even creating fully functional simulations. Not extendable via Vizard SDK, viewer is branded and does not allow fullscreen mode. VIZARD Dev Edition Includes all Lite Edition features, plus fullscreen mode, unbranded viewer, networking support, commercial license, support/maintenance, 700 page printed manual, CD ROM, Vizard extensible SDK. This edition is suited for applications with a professional appearance that has no watermark and can be run in borderless fullscreen mode. VIZARD Enterprise Edition 2.5 Includes all Dev Edition features, plus C/C++ API, cluster support and IE viewer. The C/C++ interface includes all the powerful capabilities of the Vizard:Python library but directly at the C programming level. The cluster functionality of Vizard handles all the low-level details of running a single simulation across multiple machines. VIZARD Enterprise Edition 3.0 (available Q3 2006) Includes all Enterprise Edition 2.5 features, plus Publish as executable. Upgrade from version 2.5 to 3.0 is free, but requires active support contract. |
