Dr. Vijay D. Gokhale has pioneered and popularized many seminar topics right from computer fundamentals to MultiOS installations. Distinctive point of attraction of these seminars, apart from the subject topic, is the demonstration of selective project work he has done so far. From many years now, one the final day of seminar, he has been showcasing awe inspiring demonstrations of his dedicated work in real time rendering technologies such as OpenGL, Direct X. Time and over again, the feedbacks craved for seminars and courses into these technologies. Despite of such overwhelming response, requests, pleadings Dr. Vijay D. Gokhale sir had been cautious while committing himself any such idea. The principle reason being the sheer complexity, scale and steep learning curve involved in mastering these technologies.
Although none of the aforementioned facts have changed, Dr. Vijay D. Gokhale sir did take a cognizance of the new developments in real time rendering technologies. The advent of OpenGL ES and the WebGL, meant real time rendering technology was not going to be a luxury confined to few elite users who could afford expensive video cards and high resolution monitors but it was going to be ubiquitous, nay, rather more pervasive than desktop through billions of hand held devices and plethora of browsers running on them. This means more demand for developers who can program these applications. This in turn means more opportunities for sincere developers to work in these core technologies, something sir always expected and will continue to expect from all of his students.
As sir has always been a person who walked the talk, it was very obvious that he was not going to sit idle when opportunity had presented itself after such a long wait. He had to do everything he could, an obligation that he himself has put upon him, to assist his students to cross the initial barrier in this domain and give them an edge in competitive world. Therefore, breaking the shackles of all the apprehensions he had, he announced the series of three seminars on ‘Real Time Rendering with OpenGL’. However, exciting it was to him and his students, he was not, even unknowingly, going to compromise with his core philosophy of teaching, in the raw enthusiasm generated around him and the seminar series . The essence of his philosophy is sound pedagogy of starting from the basics, and then build upwards, however far fetched the entire journey seems. Accordingly, he covered OpenGL programming using fixed function pipeline, a technology of developed in 1990’s but remains instrumental to grasp state of the art! To focus more on rendering concepts he used GLUT library, a wrapper around low level operating system API’s for window creation and handling keyboard and mouse events. Although GLUT is a very convenient tool for breaking ice with OpenGL, it is not at all suitable for production development. Reason is two fold viz. (i) it introduces unaffordable performance bottleneck, (ii) real time rendering on embedded platform (OpenGL ES) and web platform started from programmable pipeline itself rendering use of GLUT impossible on those platform. Therefore, in his second seminar, he deconstructed the mystery of GLUT and covered native API’s of not only Microsoft’s Win 32 GDI but also of X-Window system (library for native GUI programming on Unix based systems), and COCOA(library for native GUI programming on MAC OS X operating system by Apple Inc). And then in the third seminar he turned his attention to the state of the art, ‘Real Time Rendering using Programmable Pipeline with OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL)’. All three seminar were extremely well received. Through this series he did what was unthinkable! To introduce students to real time rendering with OpenGL on all major operating system platforms in merely six days! Considering the depth and the breadth of subject, many thought it was going to stop at seminar level. Because it was inconceivable that sir would start a full fledged course on this subject because of the timing constraint. If tip of Win32 SDK, tip of COM, tip of WinRT (a tip which seems iceberg even to most seasoned professionals), take six months to cover, then imagine how much time would it take to cover the tip of Real Time Rendering with OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Direct X and WebGL on all major platforms, viz. Windows, Linux, MAC desktops, Android and iPhone , and the Web! We leave the extrapolation of time to the reader. You may defer the same to some point later but as of now, we ask you extrapolate the current reading tab to ‘About OpenGL course’ tab.