Direct link to: Mobile demos

With the release of BS Contact iOS we address the needs of customers developing applications in industry areas such as:

• E-commerce
• E-learning
• E-government
• E-healthcare

In branches of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality such as:

• CAD
• Visualization of simulation or measurement results
• Architecture
• Product visualization

BS Contact iOS adds significantly to the BS Contact product portfolio, bring the world of real-time 3D to the rapidly growing, technology-saavy market of handheld computing users.

The software is a stable and high performance visualization solution for handheld devices running the iOS ® operating system.

Please download the test version of BS Contact Mobile and the user's manual or check the systems requirements in the Download Center.

Release notes

BS Contact IOS

BS Contact supports Apple iOS Devices

Supported Devices

BSContact IOS requires OpenGL ES 2.0
OpenGL ES 1.1 is not supported .

iOS Version 4.2 or newer is required. 

Launching BSContact iOS

Launching the BSContact App

A default scene embedded in the resources is loaded,
if the private Documents folder contains a file named main.wrl this file is loaded. This file can be transfered via ITunes.

Launching via Safari or other applications

BSContact iOS registers the url protocol bscontact:

Entering an url into the safari url input field starting with bscontact: will launch

Anchor url links in the HTML code are working as well

bscontact:file.wrl

bscontact:documents:file.wrl

BSContact iOS registers the file extension wrl:

Files ending in .wrl will lauch BSContact. Because Safari downloads the file to the inbox folder in this case the base url is not available to resolve other url in the file.

Supported Textureformats

Image formats supported by the iOS UIImage class

 Supported file formats Format Filename extensions
Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) .tiff, .tif
Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) .jpg, .jpeg
Graphic Interchange Format (GIF) .gif
Portable Network Graphic (PNG) .png
Windows Bitmap Format (DIB) .bmp, .BMP
Windows Icon Format .ico
Windows Cursor .cur
XWindow bitmap .xbm
Note: Windows Bitmap Format (BMP) files that are formatted as RGB-565 are converted to ARGB-1555 when they are loaded.

Image loaded via UIImage are top down, the texture coordinate in the shader need to be adapted :
texCoord = vec2(texCoordIn.x,1.0-texCoordIn.y);

PVR compressed textures
can be created with the Apple texturetool

convert Image.png into PVRTC using linear weights and 4 bpp, and saving as ImageL4.pvr
user$ texturetool -e PVRTC --channel-weighting-linear --bits-per-pixel-4 -o ImageL4.pvr Image.png

For best performance

• use small textures
• use texture sizes which are power of 2, otherwise images are rescaled on loading use simple indexed facesets (only coordIndex, solid TRUE, creaseAngle 3.14)
• reuse appearance nodes

Contact emulates some basic VRML/X3D Appearance node with built-in shaders:

• unlighted material with or without texture
• lit material with a simple headlight with or without texture

Most applications should write their own GLSL 2 shaders if features like :

• different light sources like spot point lights
• multiple light sources
• multi-texturing
• texture transform
• texture coordinate generation
• vertex colors
• advanced lighting
• fog is needed

Node Support

BSContact iOS supports the full feature set including scripting of BSContact 7.2 except restrictions of special nodes requiring additional OS services.

Support for Medianodes

Sound Audioclip supports OpenAL

MovieTexture supports Animated GIF url download via HTTP and local caching is supported

Text is not supported beside the Text emulation via a user defined fixed character texture

Layer2D Layer3D is supported

CompositeTexture3D is supported

Inline is supported

Extensions for iOS

DeviceSensor node supports multitouch events

touchstart
touchmove
touchend
touchcancel

DeviceSensor 
{
	eventType "touch"
}

eventOut MFNode touches

Touch : NodeMetadata { 
	
	SFInt32 type					//!< type of event touchstart touchmove touchend touchcancel
    
	SFVec2f clientPosition			//!< coordinates relative to the client window size
	SFVec2f clientPreviousPosition	//!< previous coordinates relative to the client window size
  

	SFVec3f position				//!< coordinate in relative screen space x/z -1 .. 1 
    	SFVec3f previousPosition		//!< previous coordinate in relative screen space x/z
	
	SFInt32 tapCount				// number of taps 
}	 

type:
	ITouchPhaseBegan = 0            // whenever a finger touches the surface.
    ITouchPhaseMoved,             // whenever a finger moves on the surface.
    ITouchPhaseStationary,        // whenever a finger is touching the surface but hasn't moved since the previous event.
    ITouchPhaseEnded,             // whenever a finger leaves the surface.
    ITouchPhaseCancelled,         // whenever a touch doesn't end but we need to stop tracking (
   
    

Shader Examples:

Simple Light + Texture:

Appearance {
          material Material {
            diffuseColor 1 0.2 0.2
          }
          texture DEF earth-topo ImageTexture {
            url [ "earth-topo.png" ]
          }

		shaders  DEF SHADER ComposedShader  
				{

					language "GLSLES" 
					# any needed parameters can be mapped to fields here 
					field SFVec4f  diffuseColor  1 1 1 1 #1 0.2 0.2 1
					field SFVec4f  emissiveColor 0 0 0 0
					field SFNode   texture USE  earth-topo

					parts [

						ShaderPart {
				    		type "VERTEX"
							url "glsl:
							uniform    highp   mat4 modelViewProjection;
							uniform    mediump mat4 modelViewIT;

							attribute  mediump vec4 position;
							attribute  mediump vec3 normal;
							attribute  mediump vec2	texCoord;

							uniform    mediump vec4 diffuseColor;
							uniform    mediump vec4 emissiveColor;

							varying    mediump vec4 colorFrag;
							varying    mediump vec2	texCoordFrag;

							void main(void)
							{
								gl_Position = modelViewProjection * position;
   
								vec3  normalView = normalize( vec3(modelViewIT * vec4(normal, 0.0)));
								vec3  lightDir=vec3(0,0,1);
								float NdotL = max(dot(normalView, lightDir), 0.0);
								colorFrag = NdotL * diffuseColor + emissiveColor;
								colorFrag.w = diffuseColor.w;
								texCoordFrag = texCoord.st;
							}
					
							"

						}
						ShaderPart {						
							type "FRAGMENT"
							url "glsl:
							uniform sampler2D	texture;
							varying mediump vec2	texCoordFrag;
							varying mediump vec4    colorFrag;

							void main(void)
							{
								gl_FragColor = colorFrag*texture2D(texture, texCoordFrag);
							}
							"
						}
					]
				}    
    

The following uniform parameters declared in a shader are automatically set by Contact:

For matrix parameters suffixes can be appended: the suffix I is for inverse, T for transpose, IT for inverse transpose

 
struct MaterialParameters {
mediump vec4 emission;
mediump vec4 ambient;
mediump vec4 diffuse;
mediump vec4 specular;
mediump float shininess;
};
uniform MaterialParameters FrontMaterial;   
          

 
const int MaxLights=2;
struct LightSourceParameters {
	 mediump vec4 ambient;              // Acli
	 mediump vec4 diffuse;              // Dcli
	 mediump vec4 specular;             // Scli
	 mediump vec4 position;             // Ppli
	 mediump vec4 halfVector;           // Derived: Hi
	 mediump vec3 spotDirection;        // Sdli
	 mediump float spotExponent;        // Srli
	 mediump float spotCutoff;          // Crli
								// (range: [0.0,90.0], 180.0)
	 mediump float spotCosCutoff;       // Derived: cos(Crli)
								// (range: [1.0,0.0],-1.0)
	 //mediump float constantAttenuation; // K0
	 //mediump float linearAttenuation;   // K1
	 //mediump float quadraticAttenuation;// K2
	 mediump vec3  attenuation;
};

uniform LightSourceParameters LightSource[MaxLights];
   
          

GL:
	gl_Position = gl_ModelViewProjectionMatrix * gl_Vertex;
GLES:
    uniform    highp mat4 modelViewProjection;	
    attribute  highp vec4 position;
	
	gl_Position = modelViewProjection * position; 

Normals:	
    attribute  mediump vec3 normal;
    uniform    mediump mat4 modelViewIT;	
    
    //viewspace normal
	N = normalize( vec3(modelViewIT * vec4(normal, 0.0)));;

Texture coordinates:  
  
    attribute  mediump vec2	texCoord0;
    attribute  mediump vec3	texCoord1;
    attribute  mediump vec3	texCoord2;

    varying    mediump vec2	TexCoord0;
    varying    mediump vec3	TexCoord1;
    varying    mediump vec3	TexCoord2;

	TexCoord0 =  texCoord0;	
	TexCoord1 =  texCoord1;	
	TexCoord2 =  texCoord2;

	
 

BSContact iOS Developer Version

Detecting platform

Browser.getOption('product:platform')

possible values:IPHONE
IPHONE SIMULATOR
ANDROID
APPLE
UNIX
WIN32
WIN64

References

Mobile demos

iOS:OpenGL ES Programming Guide for iOS

iOS::Best Practices for Shaders

iOS:Using texturetool to Compress Textures