The humble beginning of Coin goes all the way back to late 1995 when the software developers at Systems in Motion created a 3D graphics rendering library inspired by, and designed to support, the VRML 1.0 file format. This library was used in amongst others SIM's VRMLview and Rational Reducer (up to v2.4).

After years of extensions, optimizations, and what-have-you, SIM's rendering library began to reach its limitations and needed a serious rework with a better fundamental design. We needed flexibility, functionality and extensibility able to support the requirements of future versions of Rational Reducer, as well as efficient development of custom solutions for our partners. We needed a high-level, retained mode rendering library with support for multiple platforms and multiple file formats.

Parts of the API was already quite like the Open Inventor API on the surface, and since the fundamental design of the Open Inventor API is so excellent, we chose to make our new library, then named Coin, API compatible with Open Inventor.

The API decision was followed by a long period of "inventorizing" our rendering library. The fundamentals are now mostly in place, and we are currently working on filling in the missing pieces to become as compatible with the Open Inventor API as possible.

With an alternative to SGI's and TGS' Open Inventor libraries on our hands, we thought; Why not make this great tool available to the rest of the community? The launch of Coin under the LGPL, and later under a commercial license, is the direct answer to that question.

Prospect

We have now more or less achieved complete compatibility with the Open Inventor 2.1 API. We won't stop there, though. A natural next is to go for more platform support and more file format support, just like we have done and are doing with Rational Reducer. Our Coin development team has also played central roles during Rational Reducer development, and are eager to throw their 3D graphics optimization experience at Coin. Our dream is to combine efficient coding and efficient performance into a library that will be a must for anyone writing software for 3d graphics.