This star and planet charting iPhone 3Gs app uses your current global position, heading, and accelerometer data to draw a current picture of the stars and planets around you. A small portion of the code is GPL licensed, but the bulk is BSD-style license or less restrictive. The app and source code make a great learning tool.

Metismo, a Mobile technology firm, has released an OpenGL ES library for the PSP. Originally developed as part of its Bedrock mobile porting technology, Metismo has decided to release the OpenGL ES package as a static library that can be linked to the SN Systems compiler.

iChemLabs introduces a WebGL extension to their popular, open source, HTML5 chemistry library, ChemDoodle Web Components. Allowing for the complete rendering of molecules in 3D, the ChemDoodle Web Components allow scientists to provide interactive 3D graphics on their webpages. Companies and universities have become interested in WebGL, and iChemLabs believes the technology will revolutionize how the sciences are presented, such as how pharmaceutical companies interact with their customers, how professors teach students, and how synthetic chemists will communicate. The title links to a component allowing one to view structures from the PubChem database. For further information, view this article published on MacResearch.

CopperLicht, a fast JavaScript 3D engine has been released today in its first public version. It uses WebGL and is able to render huge 3d worlds like Quake 3 levels (see the demos) at playable speeds. It comes with a full 3d world editor to edit levels and maps and is free to be used. Via it’s world editor, CopperLicht is able to import more than 20 3D file formats (like .3ds, .obj, .x, .lwo, COLLADA etc), so it is very easy to create content using this 3d engine. This is the first public release of CopperLicht, so Ambiera, the developer behind this 3d engine is happy about any suggestions, feature requests and comments.

Rightware’s Kanzi SDK offers the missing link to chain today’s mainstream 3D graphics content creation tools, such as 3DS Max, Maya and XSI with cell phones and other mobile devices. Artists will be able to export their UI base designs from the software packages to Kanzi SDK using COLLADA data format. Kanzi also sports a unified pipeline for OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenGL ES 1.x based 3D graphics, with the engine able to run real-time streaming data, texture and fragment shaders, as well as multi-texturing and dynamic lighting.

3d-test has posted a short interview with Marco Di Benedetto, the developer behind SpiderGL. Learn why SpiderGL came into existence, where it is now, and where it is going.

The OpenSL ES workgroup is pleased to announce that OpenSL ES version 1.0.1 has been released and is available for download. The update to the specification includes clarifications and minor bug fixes. Among the bug fixes are adjustments to make sure that OpenSL ES is aligned with OpenMAX AL 1.0. The OpenSL ES 1.0.1 specification is available in the Khronos public registry here (pdf), and the header files are available here.

South Korean mobile phone maker Samsung has unveiled details on its own smartphone operating system “bada.” The new OS offers full support for EGL, OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0, allowing developers to use their own approach when building applications. An OpenGL ES centric comparison between “bada”, Android and iPhone is well available on the Samsung “bada” developers forum.

Rightware will demonstrate ‘Mobile App Store’ application, designed and implemented using Kanzi user interface solution, running in various mobile devices at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona from February 15th through February 18th. Key advantage of the Kanzi solution is “design-once, deploy everywhere” cross-platform support for the leading mobile operating systems, including Android, Blackberry, Linux, Maemo, Moblin, iPhone OS, Palm Web OS, Symbian OS, and Windows Mobile. Kanzi solution is build on top of industry standard OpenGL ES graphics API. A video featuring some capabilities of Kanzi is available online.