Underneath every specialty on this site is the same thing: real-time 3D graphics. We have been rendering interactive 3D since the 80s and 90s, from early line-drawing hardware to the low-level OpenGL and Vulkan calls up through full scene graphs, and most of what we do is a particular application of that one craft. We do it all. We've worked on virtually every generation of graphics hardware since the Amiga in the mid 80s. Our first commercial product, 3D Nature, grew out of that era: it debuted on the Amiga as World Construction Set in the early 1990s, rendering whole-world terrain from real elevation and GIS data at high precision, before consumer 3D GPUs existed.
Real-time rendering
OpenGL and OpenGL ES and SC, DirectX, Metal, Vulkan, and the scene graphs built on them: OpenSceneGraph and its Vulkan successor VulkanSceneGraph. We write renderers from the pipeline up, profile and optimize the ones that are too slow, and port the ones that stopped building when the platform moved on. If it draws geometry in real time, it is in our wheelhouse. Literally, we worked on a maritime AR training simulator of a ship's bridge.
The specialties
Most projects are one of these, and many are several at once:
- OpenSceneGraph and osgEarth, the scene graph and terrain engine at the center of our work.
- Geospatial and terrain, whole-earth rendering, GIS, and the data pipelines behind it.
- Computer vision, where the camera is the sensor and the render is the proof.
- Space domain, orbital and lunar visualization at planetary scale.
- Visual simulation, image generators and trainers.
- VR, AR, and xR, the same scenes in a headset at full frame rate.
- Safety-critical and embedded, graphics that have to certify and fit.
- RISC-V and Linux, the silicon and the operating system underneath.
- Slughorn GPU vector-text library.
Why one team
The seams are where projects fail. The renderer, the terrain that has to match the sensor, the headset that needs the frame a millisecond sooner: those are hard parts, and they lurk between the specialties, not inside them. We work across the whole stack, so the seams are ours to get right.
Who works on it
AlphaPixel is a US-owned small business, founded in 2004, with senior developers who each have decades in real-time 3D. DLA DD2345 / ITAR registered. We take closed-source defense work and open source alike, and we do not sell an engine, so our advice is not a sales pitch for one.
Talk to us
Tell us what you’re building and where it’s stuck. We’ll tell you straight whether it’s something we can help with, and how we’d approach it.
Or see how we run consulting and software development engagements.
