Open Inventor - More than a 3D toolkit

Thinking beyond tomorrow

The widespread and long term use of Open Inventor confirms that it is an effective and cost effective solution. In fact Open Inventor is the most widely used scenegraph API across multiple industries ranging from science to seismic to engineering. Our customers have shipped hundreds of thousands of copies of applications based on Open Inventor and thousands of developers are actively using Open Inventor.

Strong support

The Open Inventor SDK is much more than just a library of functions and a reference manual. Many tools are available to help you get started quickly and get your job done faster.
For example: the book The Open Inventor Mentor; the Introduction to Open Inventor; the Open Inventor User’s Guide; and hundreds of example programs.
To really get a fast start you can take Open Inventor training and get guided through hands-on programming exercises to help you choose the features you need.
Open Inventor is professionally supported with a team composed of highly experienced personnel and VSG support for Open Inventor is highly praised by our customers.

Active User Community

In addition to the direct benefits of using Open Inventor, belonging to an extensive community of users brings many indirect benefits.

Your enhancement requests carry more weight, you benefit from enhancement requests from other users and similar requirements across the community means problems are identified quickly (you benefit from “testing” done by other users).

Open Inventor users can also take advantage of direct interaction with other users through our forum www.openinventor.net.

Rich and flexible licensing model

Developing a successful partnership with a third-party software vendor such as a 3D technology provider also includes the certainty that it will be in the long run more profitable than developing an in-house solution.
VSG have developed a flexible licensing model that efficiently supports the adoption of Open Inventor by your development team and the deployment of built applications in phase with your business strategy.

Robust foundations for the future

Because the company vision goes beyond tomorrow, investment protection is critical and all the components of software products must be durable, and not become obsolete with the always more demanding market needs and the constantly evolving technologies.


VSG has been developing 3D visualization software technologies for over 20 years and has acquired unique knowledge and expertise. Supporting industrial-strength professional applications for over 10 years, Open Inventor® is proven to be the safe choice for the long term and the most flexible tool to transfer technology evolutions and unique innovations to your solutions.

Advanced support of leading open standards
Based on top of the OpenGL® well-known standard, Open Inventor has been furthermore designed to natively support leading development environments, such as Microsoft MFC library and Trolltech Qt graphic application development framework, through dedicated sets of classes which provides for example easy and elegant ways to integrate Open Inventor graphic components such as viewers, editors... within Qt Designer.
Technical Specifications
Get access to VSG Open Inventor technical specs and Developer Zone
Why Open Inventor?
Read why Open Inventor is the 3D SDK of choice for software companies