The Mental Vision framework - A platform for teaching, practicing and researching with computer graphics and virtual reality

Despite the wide amount of computer graphics frameworks and solutions available, it is still difficult to find a perfect one fitting at the same time many constraints, like pedagogical intents and user-friendliness or speed with high rendering quality and portability. In this article we describe our contribution to the topic: the Mental Vision platform. Mental Vision is a framework composed of a teaching/research oriented graphics engine simplifying the users needs in computer visualization and a set of corollary tools specifically designed for practicing and learning of computer graphics and virtual reality. In this dissertation we explain our approach design and the contribution brought into a series of study cases to show how concretely Mental Vision satisfies existing needs not addressed by other solutions.