Platinum Tech. Planning OSS Web 3D Tools?

There is a story over at News.com that says that Platinum Technologies has signed a letter of intent with the Web3d Consortium to turn over the source code for some of the Cosmo tools for some type of open source developement project. This could be a big development for 3D on the web. What do you think of the Cosmo line or tools and programs? I tried them on an SGI (if it's the same code) a while ago and they were pretty sweet. Here is the press release from Platinum..

Comments

Release the source to OpenInventor

[joss]

VRML is derivative subset of OpenInventor file format. OpenInventor is a truly excellent interactive 3d c++ development library built on top of OGL.

SGI thought that vrml & the web would save their hides because everyone would start using 3D on the web, and that would somehow generate demand for SGI hardware. This failed miserably since nobody had any real reason to use 3D on the web, and nobody had any serious development tools to make it possible. If SGI had released OpenInventor source code back then VRML would really have taken off since developers would have been able to create excellent tools for building 3D worlds.

Instead SGI dropped OpenInventor (now licensed to www.tgs.com) and tried to create the end user modeling tools/viewers themselves. The Cosmo modeler was kinda crappy and expensive so nobody bothered.

The release of cosmo stuff is definite step in the right direction, but the real masterstroke that would revitalise VRML would be to release OpenInventor under LPGL. This would enable lots of developers to build proper 3D applications (not just web crap) and really would stimulate demand for good 3d hardware (ummmmmmm... SGI's VPC + decent drivers for Linux).