Warren Moore

I’ve spoken with four teams in the past three days that would benefit from what I’m terming “mobile real-time rendering infrastructure”: a source-available, approachable, extensible library/ecosystem for building 3D apps and visualizations without the overhead of a “game engine”

The question is, is this a viable niche? You’re using SceneKit, but you’ve hit performance cliffs. You want to use Unity/Unreal, but they’re massive and cumbersome. Is there a (cross-platform) middle road for small teams building interactive/entertainment/edu/AR/viz apps?

I haven’t done much research yet, but I see things like Cinder, OpenFrameworks, and any number of nascent projects and I have to think things could be simpler and easier. You shouldn’t have to go the full Godot to add 3D to your app.

It was one of the reasons behind the creation of Filament (although it’s not quite enough on its own). Apps could either use GL/Vulkan or a full-blown game engine. That’s also why we focus a lot on binary size

Love the Filament approach. It’s very close to what I’m envisioning. I’m learning a lot from you right now.

The grander vision would be to have utilities on top of it to do assets loadings, text, 2D vector rendering, maybe a scene graph for those who like this kind of things, etc. as individual/optional libraries. It can be done by clients today (ex: ImGui works with public APIs only)