The section "Business Information" continues to publish information about latest hard/soft-ware developments in computer graphics and geometry applications.
V.Pilyugin
OpenGL is the premier environment for developing portable, interactive 2D and 3D graphics applications. Since its introduction in 1992, OpenGL has become the industry's most widely used and supported 2D and 3D graphics application programming interface (API), bringing thousands of applications to a wide variety of computer platforms. OpenGL fosters innovation and speeds application development by incorporating a broad set of rendering, texture mapping, special effects, and other powerful visualization functions. Developers can leverage the power of OpenGL across all popular desktop and workstation platforms, ensuring wide application deployment. The current finished version of OpenGL is OpenGL 2.1.
The newest revision of the OpenGL API will be OpenGL 3.0, formerly known as the codename Longs Peak (OpenGL 2.x) as it was unveiled by the OpenGL ARB (OpenGL Architecture Review Board ) on 09 august 2007. OpenGL 3 (codename Mount Evans) will be a great increase in efficiency in an already excellent API. It will provide a solid, consistent and well thought out foundation for the future evolution of the OpenGL standard. OpenGL 3 is a true industry effort with broad support from all vendors in the ARB. It was anonced that the OpenGL 3 specification was on track to be finalized at the next face-to-face meeting of the OpenGL ARB, at the end of August, but the Khronos group announced October 30 that it had run into several issues that it wished to address before the release and is currently re-evaluating the specification. As a result the specification has been delayed into 2008.
This specification is still ongoing work. You can read about OpegGL 3.0 updates on the OpenGL Discussion Boards.
The ARB recognizes it is extremely important to get OpenGL Longs Peak and Mount Evans done. (It was stated that codenames are used because the ARB's marketing group will think through later what the right names would be for these releases. Too many suggestions have already been made, including OpenGL 2.2, OpenGL 3.0, OpenGL 3.1 and even OpenGL 4.0. This is not the time yet to pin down the version number, and so code names are used). You can read about the most important recent advances in The OpenGL Pipeline Newsletter.
Publication is based on the contents of Official OpenGL site website
Prepared by editor A. Korolenko (Russia).