The Aardvark Platform

Awesome libraries for interactive high-performance visual computing and graphics applications.

Getting started

Github is a good starting point. Since the platform contains a lot of repositories it really depends on your needs. All packages are on Nuget --- feel free to mix and match the packages you need.

Also take a look at .NET Core SDK templates for bootstrapping new Aardvark projects created by Evgeniy Andreev .

Meet the community

Join us on Discord, Gitter and Github.

Aardvark.Base

The basis for all. This repository contains a variety of useful libraries including algorithms and data structures, utilities for functional programming, but also a graph-based incremental evaluation system going beyond publish/subscribe. All libraries are netstandard and run on all platforms, while compilation to javascript is an ongoing effort.

Aardvark.Rendering

Fast, flexible and easy to use rendering is possible. This repository contains easy to use yet high-performance tools and abstractions for computer graphics. The 3D renderer bridges the abstraction gap via smart concepts such as incremental optimization based on dependeny tracking. The cross-platform rendering kernel is netstandard compliant and has a backend for OpenGL and Vulkan.

Aardvark.Media

User interfaces and 3D graphics belong together! This library seemlessly connects purely functional ELM-style applications with high-performance 3D graphics. In Aardvark.Media, clicking 3D objects or buttons in HTML follow the same unified principle. Currently, we use a web server and a Javascript code generator. Applications run in web browsers, or natively in pure dotnet core using Aardium, a wrapper for Electron.

The platform in the community

We regularly join conferences or give talks in meetups and academic conferences. Some selected contributions are:

FSharp.Data.Adaptive

Our tried and tested incremental computation engine will be made available as a standalone library.

FP vs Efficiency

This talk describes why Aardvark is functional and fast. Talk at GPU Day 2018

FP in the Wild

Talk at GPU Day 2018

FShade

Talk at GPU Day 2018

F# Community

The platform in academia

A lot of basic research is going on in the base modules, some of which has been published:

An Incremental Rendering VM. Proceedings of the 7th Conference on High-Performance Graphics, 51-60.
Attribute Grammars For Incremental Scene Graph Rendering Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 1: GRAPP
Lazy Incremental Computation for Efficient Scene Graph Rendering. Proceedings of the 5th High-Performance Graphics Conference, 53-62.

Users of the platform

The platform is used in many research and industry projects (we will add more awesome results here):

Fast light simulation

HILITE - High Quality Lighting Simulation: A dynamic, interactive, realistic real-time lighting simulation for complex architectural environments.

PRo3D

PRo3D, short for Planetary Robotics 3D Viewer, is an interactive 3D visualization tool to allow planetary scientists to work with high-resolution 3D reconstructions of the Martian surface.

rmDATA 3DWorx

In a collaboration with VRVis, rmDATA works on 3DWorx an innovative tool turning plain laser scan data into useful products.

Academia

The platform is used in multiple research projects at VRVis. At TU Wien parts of the engine are used in the universtiy course Design and Implementation of a Rendering Engine .

Our story

Aardvark was born at VRVis Research Center in 2006.
It started out as a research prototype for rendering engine architecture written in C# by the late Robert F. Tobler.
Very quickly, the effort was joined by more and more core contributors. Lots of ideas were tried out and many research and industry projects were implemented on top of an ever growing platform. Out of necessity, the focus shifted more and more towards functional programming patterns to enable easy-to-use abstractions, reusability and robustness. First in C#, then in F#. Today, most of the code is published under a permissive license.

Our roadmap

Right now, all the platform and community projects contain more than 25 repositories (platform and community) and we hope for our community to grow further. The core contributors feel highly connected to all the projects and support it via work at VRVis Research Center and the newly founded startup Aardworx.

Licensing and support

The platform constitutes a diverse set of repositories, libraries and other content. Since the very early days of Aardvark, we lived the philosophy of reusing as much as possible. Nowadays, the organizational structure of the project also reflects our constant dedication to synergies. In order to provide a balanced and fair situation for both academia and industry, we now use a mix of fully permissive and dual licenced libraries.


Currently, the main contributors of libraries in the Aardvark ecosystem are VRVis and Aardworx, both situated in Vienna, Austria.
Customization, project coordination, maintenance contracts, and commercial licensing for AGPL packages are currently managed by aardvark@vrvis.at.