Coin3D is a free and open-source implementation (library) of the Open Inventor API. Coin3D was originally developed and maintained as commercial software by the Norwegian company Kongsberg Oil & Gas Technologies (formerly Kongsberg SIM).^[1] Coin3D, like Open Inventor, is a C++ object-oriented retained mode 3D graphics API used to provide a higher layer of programming for OpenGL. The API provides a number of common graphics rendering constructs to developers such as scene graphs to accomplish this. Coin3D is fully compatible with the Open Inventor API version 2.1.^[1] Coin3D can be used to drive advanced visualization solutions in a wide range of application domains such as geo-modelling, CAD, medical visualization, robotics and presentation.

Uses

According to Kongsberg Oil & Gas Technologies, the software is used in a number of commercial and open-source, scientific visualization or 3D modeling projects such as OpenRAVE. Apple, for example, used Coin for 3D rendering in iWork '08 and later. FreeCAD relies on Coin3D for visualization.^[2][3]

License history

From 1998 to 2011 Coin3D was developed and maintained by Systems in Motion (SIM), later renamed to Kongsberg SIM, later merged into the parent company Kongsberg Oil & Gas Technologies Kongsberg Gruppen. During this period Coin3D was available under a dual license scheme: GPL or a proprietary commercial license. Mid-2011, Kongsberg decided to end Coin3D as a commercial product due to diminishing demand and changing business focus. As a service to the user community Kongsberg re-licensed Coin3D under the less restrictive BSD 3-clause license.^[1][4][5] Since then, the BSD licensed source code has been maintained by its users and is available at GitHub.^[1]

Integration with GUI development kits

Several libraries exist that are designed to integrate Coin3D with GUI development environments.

• For developers targeting multi-platform - 'Quarter' provides a seamless integration with the Qt framework.
• For developers targeting Windows - 'SoWin' integrates with the Win32 API.
• For developers targeting Mac OS X - Sc21 provides integration with Apple's Cocoa framework

Legacy GUI bindings are Qt (SoQt), Win32 API (SoWin) and Motif (SoXt) are also maintained.

Language bindings

Coin3D is written in C++, but can be accessed from other programming languages using available bindings. Bindings have been developed for Python Pivy, Java and JavaScript.