Unscientific introduction to OpenGL

This section will provide a quick introduction to the basics of OpenGL. It's next to impossible to meaningfully summarize all the nooks and crannies of the standard here; hence it is "unscientific," superficial.

OpenGL is a popular low-level graphical API. It's standardized and almost ubiquitous. Desktop and mobile operating systems commonly ship with an implementation of OpenGL (in the case of mobile, OpenGL ES, a feature-restricted subset of the standard; here, ES stands for embedded systems). Modern web browsers also implement a variant of OpenGL ES called WebGL.

Wide distribution and a well-defined compatibility makes OpenGL a good target for cross-platform apps, especially video games and graphical toolkits. Kivy also relies on OpenGL to perform rendering across all the supported platforms.

Concepts and parallelism

OpenGL operates on basic primitives such as individual vertices and pixels on screen. For example, we can feed three...