Preface

Dedicated to Felicitas

Welcome to the OpenSG tutorial. My name is Oliver Abert, currently I am a student of computer visualistics at the University of Koblenz in Germany. Although I did my best, you may find some words or phrases that are not really that english - it's okay for me if you smile about such phrases, but please have a bit forbearance with me, as I am no native english speaker!

I first got OpenSG to know in a project at my university, where a group of students had to develop a stereo virtual reality application. I was the team leader for the software part (we also had a design team, that created models, textures, etc.) at that time and beside that I also was responsible for the rendering component. Well, I guess you are not surprised if I tell you now, that OpenSG became our system of choice for the job. In the following six month, that was from summer till winter 2003, I made my hands dirty with OpenSG. I realized that OpenSG was really powerful and fun to work with, but at the beginning it was quite hard, because the available documentation was not that complete, so I was sure that there is a great demand on an improved documentation especially for beginners.

Of course that alone would not make me write a documentation of that size. Since my second semester I am a student assisant in the computer graphics institute, which is lead by Prof. Dr. Mueller. Well and he was executive committee by OpenSG before he came to my university. By knowing him, I also get to knew Dirk Reiners, one of the main developers of OpenSG. To make it short - after severeal weeks of mailing forth and back we came down to a plan which result you are having on your screen or in your hand, depending on the type of media you prefer ;-)

Working on this document was fun (most of the time) and I want to say thank you to some people at this point.

Thanks to Dirk for answering a lot of questions and for correcting some of my creative english
Thanks to Stefan who made this possible, by supporting me all the way
Thanks to Matthias for helping me with the QT stuff
Thanks to Guillaume Gasnier who tracked down lots of typos
Thanks to all the others who have mailed me bugs and typos and the like<br>

Finally,
Thanks to Felicitas for encouraging me all the time
Thanks to Lena who helped me in a very difficult period of my life (well, that's private and not related to this document, though)



Now enjoy, and I hope this document will be useful to you. If you are really new to OpenSG it is best to start off with chapter Introduction.

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