Open Inventor is a C++ developer's toolkit that is built on top of OpenGL, a 3D graphics library. Its file format serves as the basis for VRML 1.0. Molecular Inventor, devloped by Mark Benzel at SGI, is a class of Open Inventor nodes specific for molecular rendering. Molecular Inventor's underlying architecture should ultimately maximize OpenGL's molecular rendering performance. Its file format will, hopefully, lend itself to a chemistry-specific VRML subset which we are working on.
For several years we have been visualizing in Open Inventor via IRIS Explorer and the EyeChem Module Suite. iCML can be considered as a stand-alone molecular renderer that runs without Explorer. It is likely that much of EyeChem, particularly its Web-related modules, will be incorporated into iCML in the future.
As Molecular Inventor is in its early stages, iCML will only run on SGI platforms at present.
Contact Omer Casher for more information.