Cross Platform 3D Rendering Engines and Mobile Devices

Student: Leander Beernaet
Supervisor: António Ramires

Abstract

Now more than ever, we live in a cross platform technological world. We are surrounded by various platforms, each with their own set of advantages and drawbacks. We’ve come to a point where we cannot delay the transition of software from one platform to another. This has become increasingly more visible with the ”rise of the smartphones”. Their evolution has sparked quite an interest and due to their ubiquitous nature and, CPU and GPU performance, they prove to be very interesting and useful computing devices.

The aim of this dissertation is to port the 3D rendering engine, Curitiba, developed at the Department of Informatics of the University of Minho, currently being developed on Windows, to the second and third most popular platforms: Mac OS X and iOS (iPhone and iPad) respectively, and create one unified project. Due to incompatibilities presented by the wxWidgets [52] toolkit (2.8.x) on Mac OS X (10.6 and greater), we ported Curitiba to the GNU/Linux platform first since it’s also POSIX compliant. Sadly, the Android platform had to be left out because, at the time, it lacked the support for C++’s STL and Exceptions. Throughout this dissertation we shall cover all the challenges faced to transform Curitiba into a cross platform software and the development of the resulting unified project. Our secondary objective is to replace the traditional keyboard and mouse interactions in a 3D rendering engine by implementing new interaction models which make use of the touch screen and/or the sensors available on the iOS platform.

Thesis download (PDF)