Introduction

In this chapter, we will demonstrate how to visualize data with stunning stereoscopic 3D technology using OpenGL. Stereoscopic 3D devices are becoming increasingly popular, and the latest generation's wearable computing devices (such as the 3D vision glasses from NVIDIA, Epson, and more recently, the augmented reality 3D glasses from Meta) can now support this feature natively.

The ability to visualize data in a stereoscopic 3D environment provides a powerful and highly intuitive platform for the interactive display of data in many applications. For example, we may acquire data from the 3D scan of a model (such as in architecture, engineering, and dentistry or medicine) and would like to visualize or manipulate 3D objects in real time.

Unfortunately, OpenGL does not provide any mechanism to load, save, or manipulate 3D models. Thus, to support this, we will integrate a new library named Open Asset Import Library (Assimp) into our code. The source code in this chapter is...