VES

What is VES?

VES is the VTK OpenGL ES Rendering Toolkit. It is a C++ rendering library for mobile devices using OpenGL ES 2.0. VES integrates with the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) to deliver scientific and medical visualization capabilities to mobile application developers.

What is Kiwi?

Kiwi provides mobile application developers with easy-to-use building blocks for embedding advanced visualizations into their Android or iOS apps. The Kiwi platform offers a collection of application oriented C++ classes that tie together VTK's wide variety of supported file formats, readers, and filters, with the OpenGL ES 2.0 rendering capabilities of VES. With Kiwi, a mobile application can integrate a fully featured visualization environment with very little code. The application can be written using C++, Java, or Objective-C. The Kiwi Platform bundles together all the required rendering components, IO routines, and scene objects into a straight forward set of interfaces. Plus, Kiwi offers a collection of 3D widgets designed for touch screens that allows users to manipulate data and interact with the 3D scene.

Why VES?

The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) is used by desktop application developers to power many leading scientific and medical research tools. VTK is composed of many different modules including I/O, data processing, statistical analysis, networking, and rendering. These modules are very useful for mobile application development, but the rendering module is not written for OpenGL ES 2.0. VES offers an OpenGL ES 2.0 based rendering library that integrates with the rest of VTK, allowing mobile developers to take full advantage of the Visualization Toolkit.

What about Licensing?

VES may be used to develop and distribute open source and closed source applications and libraries. VES is licensed with the Apache License Version 2.0. VES library dependencies are VTK and Eigen. VTK is licensed with the BSD license. Eigen is licensed with the MPL 2.0 license. Some versions of the KiwiViewer application and source code require additional dependencies and licenses, please visit the KiwiViewer Attributions page for a complete list.

How do I use it?

If you're interested in using VES and Kiwi for mobile development, the Developer's guide is the right place to start.

KiwiViewer running in the iPad simulator showing one frame of a simulation. The simulation shows a block falling and crushing a can.

Getting started
Download & build instructions Developer's guide API Documentation

Community
VES mailing list Git source repository Bug tracker User voice ideas & feature request Software quality dashboard Screenshots