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Brian E. Paul is a computer programmer who originally wrote and maintained the source code for the open source Mesa graphics library until 2012, and is still active in the project. He began writing its source code in August 1993. Mesa is a free software/open source graphics library that provides a generic OpenGL implementation for rendering three-dimensional graphics on multiple platforms.
Paul obtained his bachelor's degree at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh in 1990. He worked on the SSEC Visualization Project while obtaining his master's degree at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Paul was a graphics hobbyist. He thought it would be fun to implement a simple 3D graphics library using the OpenGL API, which he might then use instead of VOGL. He spent eighteen months of part-time development before he released the software on the Internet. The software was well received, and people began contributing to its development. [1] Graphics hardware support was added to Mesa in 1997 in the form of a Glide driver for the new 3dfx Voodoo graphics card. [2]
Paul continued working on the SSEC Project after graduation. He has also worked for Silicon Graphics, Avid Technology, and Precision Insight [1] (bought out by VA Linux Systems).
In 2000, Paul won the third Free Software Foundation Award for the Advancement of Free Software. [3]
In November 2001, he co-founded Tungsten Graphics, which was acquired by VMware in December 2008, where he now works. [1]
Paul has also contributed to or written:
OpenGL is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardware-accelerated rendering.
Open Inventor, originally IRIS Inventor, is a C++ object oriented retained mode 3D graphics toolkit designed by SGI to provide a higher layer of programming for OpenGL. Its main goals are better programmer convenience and efficiency. Open Inventor exists as both proprietary software and free and open-source software, subject to the requirements of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), version 2.1.
freedesktop.org (fd.o) is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free-software desktop environments for the X Window System (X11) and Wayland on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It was founded by Havoc Pennington, a GNOME developer working for Red Hat in March 2000. The project's servers are hosted by Portland State University, sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Google.
DirectFB is a software library with a small memory footprint that provides graphics acceleration, input device handling and abstraction layer, and integrated windowing system with support for translucent windows and multiple display layers on top of the Linux framebuffer without requiring any kernel modifications. DirectFB is free and open-source software subject to the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
GLX is an extension to the X Window System core protocol providing an interface between OpenGL and the X Window System as well as extensions to OpenGL itself. It enables programs wishing to use OpenGL to do so within a window provided by the X Window System. GLX distinguishes two "states": indirect state and direct state.
Bill Hibbard is a scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Space Science and Engineering Center working on visualization and machine intelligence. He is principal author of the Vis5D, Cave5D, and VisAD open-source visualization systems. Vis5D was the first system to produce fully interactive animated 3D displays of time-dynamic volumetric data sets and the first open-source 3D visualization system.
The Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) is the framework comprising the modern Linux graphics stack which allows unprivileged user-space programs to issue commands to graphics hardware without conflicting with other programs. The main use of DRI is to provide hardware acceleration for the Mesa implementation of OpenGL. DRI has also been adapted to provide OpenGL acceleration on a framebuffer console without a display server running.
OpenSceneGraph is an open-source 3D graphics application programming interface, used by application developers in fields such as visual simulation, computer games, virtual reality, scientific visualization and modeling.
Java OpenGL (JOGL) is a wrapper library that allows OpenGL to be used in the Java programming language. It was originally developed by Kenneth Bradley Russell and Christopher John Kline, and was further developed by the Sun Microsystems Game Technology Group. Since 2010, it has been an independent open-source project under a BSD license. It is the reference implementation for Java Bindings for OpenGL (JSR-231).
Mesa, also called Mesa3D and The Mesa 3D Graphics Library, is an open source implementation of OpenGL, Vulkan, and other graphics API specifications. Mesa translates these specifications to vendor-specific graphics hardware drivers.
A free and open-source graphics device driver is a software stack which controls computer-graphics hardware and supports graphics-rendering application programming interfaces (APIs) and is released under a free and open-source software license. Graphics device drivers are written for specific hardware to work within a specific operating system kernel and to support a range of APIs used by applications to access the graphics hardware. They may also control output to the display if the display driver is part of the graphics hardware. Most free and open-source graphics device drivers are developed by the Mesa project. The driver is made up of a compiler, a rendering API, and software which manages access to the graphics hardware.
Accelerated Indirect GLX ("AIGLX") is an open source project founded by Red Hat and the Fedora community, led by Kristian Høgsberg, to allow accelerated indirect GLX rendering capabilities to the X.Org Server and DRI drivers. This allows remote X clients to get fully hardware accelerated rendering over the GLX protocol; coincidentally, this development was required for OpenGL compositing window managers to function with hardware acceleration.
A graphics library is a program library designed to aid in rendering computer graphics to a monitor. This typically involves providing optimized versions of functions that handle common rendering tasks. This can be done purely in software and running on the CPU, common in embedded systems, or being hardware accelerated by a GPU, more common in PCs. By employing these functions, a program can assemble an image to be output to a monitor. This relieves the programmer of the task of creating and optimizing these functions, and allows them to focus on building the graphics program. Graphics libraries are mainly used in video games and simulations.
VirtualGL is an open-source software package that redirects the 3D rendering commands from Unix and Linux OpenGL applications to 3D accelerator hardware in a dedicated server and sends the rendered output to a (thin) client located elsewhere on the network. On the server side, VirtualGL consists of a library that handles the redirection and a wrapper program that instructs applications to use this library. Clients can connect to the server either using a remote X11 connection or using an X11 proxy such as a VNC server. In case of an X11 connection some client-side VirtualGL software is also needed to receive the rendered graphics output separately from the X11 stream. In case of a VNC connection no specific client-side software is needed other than the VNC client itself.
MiniGLX is a specification for an application programming interface which facilitates OpenGL rendering on systems without windowing systems, e.g. Linux without an X Window System or embedded systems without a windowing system. The interface is a subset of the GLX interface, plus a minimal set of Xlib-like functions.
nouveau is a free and open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards and the Tegra family of SoCs written by independent software engineers, with minor help from Nvidia employees.
Sun Visualization System was a sharable visualization product introduced by Sun Microsystems in January 2007. It used other Sun technologies, including Sun servers, Solaris, Sun Ray Ultra-Thin Clients, and Sun Grid Engine. The Sun Visualization System software was based on several open source technologies: Chromium to perform distributed 3D rendering, VirtualGL to re-route 3D rendering jobs to arbitrary graphics devices, and TurboVNC to deliver the rendered 3D images to a client or clients. Sun sponsored and/or contributed changes back to these projects throughout the life of the Sun Visualization System.
VisIt is an open-source interactive parallel visualization and graphical analysis tool for viewing scientific data. It can be used to visualize scalar and vector fields defined on 2D and 3D structured and unstructured meshes. VisIt was designed to handle very large data set sizes in the terascale range and yet can also handle small data sets in the kilobyte range.
EGL is an interface between Khronos rendering APIs and the underlying native platform windowing system. EGL handles graphics context management, surface/buffer binding, rendering synchronization, and enables "high-performance, accelerated, mixed-mode 2D and 3D rendering using other Khronos APIs." EGL is managed by the non-profit technology consortium Khronos Group.
MeVisLab is a cross-platform application framework for medical image processing and scientific visualization. It includes advanced algorithms for image registration, segmentation, and quantitative morphological and functional image analysis. An IDE for graphical programming and rapid user interface prototyping is available.