Vizard Virtual Reality Toolkit is everything you need to build complete, interactive 3D content. Designed for rapid prototyping, Vizard gets you creating fast, and provides the resources to deploy even the most challenging applications. With Vizard, even someone with no programming experience can leap into the world of interactive 3D content and soon discover what it's like to have an untethered imagination.
Performance Kept Simple
Vizard abstracts the field of 3D computer graphics and places it in your hands through a simple scripting language called Python. You'll quickly see how powerful this interface between technologies is and what it enables you to build very quickly.
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 more than 10 years old user community
Immersive Virtual Reality
Vizard is guaranteed to support all head-mounted displays, LCD shutter glasses, and several other specialty display technologies such as dome projectors and autostereoscopes. Most commercially available tracking devices are supported in Vizard. Vizard also supports numerous other devices such as gloves, haptic displays, force-feedback systems, and simple Microsoft DirectInputTM compatible gamepads and joysticks. There is even built-in support for high-quality 3D sound and multi-user networking. VRML and other 3D formats are supported to provide you with immediate access to large 3D databases
Connect to Hardware
Vizard supports stereoscopic head-mounted displays, 3D sound and many peripheral input devices, including head trackers and game pads. Distributed, networked environments are also supported.
Avatars Included
Built-in human face and body models and an accompanying morph designer offer a powerful tool to almost instantly insert virtual humans into existing environments. The high-level morph controller handles blending of complex facial expressions, adding life to your virtual humans. With our efficiently designed avatar meshes and animations engine, adding hundreds of humans to your environment is possible. For custom bodies, 3DMax Character Studio bipeds can be imported into Vizard. WorldViz also provides a large selection of additional high quality avatars that are available for purchase.
Solid Workflow
Vizard is based on a create and experience work flow. Python works like an interpreted language, which means you can make a change to your world and then instantly see the effect because you never need to recompile.
Vizard imports industry standard 3D model formats ('WRL', 'OSG', '3DS', 'OBJ', 'FLT', 'TXP', 'GEO', 'BSP', 'MD2', 'AC', 'LWO', 'PFB') as well as most standard image formats ('JPG', 'BMP', 'TIF', 'GIF', 'PNG', 'RGB', 'RGBA', 'DDS', 'PIC', 'JP2', 'PNM','TGA') letting you immediately leverage existing content or easily import new. An exporter is available for 3D Studio Max making it possibly to tailor visual qualities for your needs.
Collaboration and sharing is simple with Vizard since projects consist of Python-based scripts and your digital media assets. For those familiar with OpenGL, you'll be pleased to see how easily we've given you access to its most powerful features. For those not familiar with OpenGL, you can trust that Vizard's highly efficient render engine and extensive built-in optimizations keep your worlds running fast.
Technical Features
Extensive 3D model formats: .wrl (VRML2/97), .flt (Open Flight), .3ds (3D Studio Max), .txp (multi-threaded TerraPage loader), .geo (Carbon Graphics), .bsp (Quake3 world layers), .md2 (Quake animation models), .ac (AC3D),.obj (Alias Wavefront), .lwo/lw (Light Wave), .pfb (Performer) and the OSG's native .osg ASCII format, DirectX .x format, and .3dc point cloud.
Character (human biped) formats: 3D Max Character Studio (via 3rd party exporter) and Quake 3 .md2 files.
Raster image formats include: .rgb/.rgba, .dds, .tga, .gif, .bmp, .tif, .jpg, .pic, .pnm/.pgm/.pbm, and .png, jp2 (jpeg2000). Support for compressed and mip-mapped images provided in .dds format.
Audio modes: mono, stereo, 3D; support formats: .wav, .mp3, .au., .wma, .mid.
OpenGL based render core: support for most OpenGL features, including recent extensions such as vertex buffer objects (VBO) and vertex/fragment programs.
OpenSceneGraph provides an internal scene graph structure to your project, allowing you to reap the performance and programming benefits of this logical structure. Since OpenSceneGraph is an open architecture, you can write your own performance modules to expand on the already rich feature set in Vizard should the need arise.
Alpha blending (transparent) textures and surfaces.
Full-screen mode.
RGB-Z texture maps for panoramic backdrops (including cube maps) that can occlude user defined CG. For instance, use this technique to create the impression of an avatar walking behind trees in a photo panoramic background.
Multiple monitor/viewports configurations that are user definable. 16:9 aspect ratio or any other custom configuration is possible; zoom-in/out effects.
Unlimited number of cameras that can be used.
Dynamic lighting (up to eight lights, types: spot, omni and linear.
Sophisticated material shading techniques: cubic environment maps, pixel shaders, bump mapping, reflections, refraction, shadows, multi-pass texturing, particles, transparency, projective texture mapping, and non-photorealistic rendering filters.
Microsoft DirectX: audio and video capabilities are enabled by DirectX to provide highly optimized multimedia features such as video textures and spatialized sound.
Visual user interface lets you create 2D (HUD style UI elements such as text, push buttons and slider bars) and 3D content without any programming.
Extensive connectivity to hardware providers of virtual reality and VizSim equipment. See here for a complete list of support hardware.
Full collision detection capabilities between either the viewpoint and any node on the scene graph or between any two arbitrary mesh nodes on the scene graph.
Extensive support for 2D and 3D text, including TrueType fonts and techniques for reliably aligning your text.
Vizard embeds the powerful Python 2.3 language as its core medium for programming logic. This means you get a modern, object-oriented language that has an enormous and growing user community backing it ensuring that your code investment is secure and portable. Existing libraries are available for hundreds of different specialty tasks.
User definable linear and exponential fog.
View frustum culling.
Auto lookat feature.
Render to texture.
Maximum texture size depends only on hardware.
Built-in support for sophisticated character animation, including walk/run generators, motion blending, arbitrary prop attaching, full deformable mesh transformations, and LOD. Included avatars are much higher quality than typical game style characters and yet are efficient enough to allow 100 or more simultaneous avatars to be animated at full frame rates.
Numerous advanced display modes are built into Vizard, including multi-pipe rendering, quad buffering, line-interlaced stereo, and real-time render-to-texture image warping.
Sophisticated matrix operators are available that allow you to directly operate in homogenous coordinates without having to write a single line of matrix math; used to transform objects (vertices or textures coordinates), viewpoints, tracker coordinates, or arbitrary data.
Embed HTML display right in your graphics window for instant display of text and graphics.
Pre-programmed interactive nodes that minimize development time for new projects includes gravity, collisions, translation and rotation engines, path trajectories, and servoed eye point control.
Non- power-of-two static and video textures through the ARB_texture_rectangle allowing texture effects without resizing penalty.
Support for the ARB_vertex_program and ARB_fragment_program extension.
Multi-pass and multi-stage rendering including Impostors.
Polygon offset feature used for rendering polygons which overlay underlying geometry; this helps avoid z-buffer collisions.
Multi-user network based support via UDP which provides extremely easy-to-use front end for network-enabling any Vizard application.
Support for mouse, multiple gamepad/joystick/wheel (any USB DirectInput compatible device), full keyboard.
Support for nearly all standard virtual reality tracking devices (see this list of supported vendors).
Built-in support for sky-boxes
3D Model Formats
.wrl (VRML2/97), .flt (Open Flight), .3ds (3D Studio Max), .txp (multi-threaded TerraPage loader), .geo (Carbon Graphics), .bsp (Quake3 world layers), .md2 (Quake animation models), .ac (AC3D),.obj (Alias Wavefront), .lwo/lw (Light Wave), .pfb (Performer) and the OSG's native .osg ASCII format, and DirectX .X format.
Image Formats
.rgb, .dds, .tga, .gif, .bmp, .tif, .jpg, .pic and .png
Audio Formats
.wav, .mp3, .au., .wma, and .mid