Despite the multicore CPUs built into the latest Android devices today, we rely on the graphics hardware and OpenGL to achieve the smooth animations and special effects we are looking for.
Only hardware acceleration makes it possible to animate thousands of data points, text characters, polygons, image textures, and lighting effects while maintaining a sufficiently high frame rate. On the Android, Processing takes advantage of the graphics processing unit, or GPU, built into the mobile device.
Processing is a great environment to create sophisticated graphics, and it comes with an OpenGL library that can be used in all modes. It’s a free application programming interface and graphics pipeline that allows the software applications we create to leverage the graphics hardware built into our desktop computers, game consoles, and mobile devices for better graphics performance. Besides the geometry, which consists of points, lines, and polygons, we typically also work in a 3D scene with textures, lighting, and virtual cameras to control the appearance of shapes and objects and to change our perspective within the scene.Īll Android phones and tablets sold today support OpenGL ES, a lightweight implementation of the popular Open Graphics Library for embedded systems&-the industry standard for developing interactive 2D and 3D graphics applications across platforms. When we play 3D games or interact with complex data visualizations, the geometry that composes such a scene must be redrawn a few dozen times per second on the device screen&-ideally sixty times or more&-for animations and interactions to appear smooth and fluent.
Rich graphics are the staple of sophisticated mobile games and data visualizations, and recent Android phones are well equipped with the necessary graphics hardware to deliver 2D and 3D graphics rendering without degrading performance.
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