Research Abstracts - 2006

Designing Graphics Programming Interfaces for Mobile Devices

Kari Pulli, Tomi Aarnio, Kimmo Roimela & Jani Vaarala

Mobile devices such as scellular phones have evolved to a point where interactive 3D graphics is becoming feasible. This paper presents the structure and design of two 3D APIs that are specifically targeted for mobile devices: OpenGL ES and M3G. OpenGL ES is a low-level graphics API, fairly close to hardware and targeted for C/C++ programming, whereas M3G is a high-level API that can be implemented on top of OpenGL ES and is targeted for J2ME (Java 2 Mobile Edition) programming.

Previous desktop graphics APIs take graphics hardware acceleration and floating point hardware for granted. Most mobile devices do not have either of those, and have other restrictions such as very limited amount of memory. These APIs take these limitations into account. They allow both efficient software-only implementations with integer-only hardware, and dedicated mobile graphics hardware. Yet they provide all the functionality people have grown to expect in a 3D graphics API.

Screen shots from a simple M3G game running on a mobile phone already in 2003..

Further information on the APIs can be found in the materials for a SIGGRAPH 2005 course on this topic, and in the paper itself..