The OpenSceneGraph project was initiated as an avocation by Don Burns in 1998. He used to work for SGI and is a hang-gliding enthusiast. He wrote a simplified SGI Performer-like scene graph API on a humble Linux PC, named SG, which was the prototype of OSG.
In 1999, Robert Osfield, a design consultant for a hang-glider manufacturer, started to take part in this young project. He suggested continuity to develop SG as a standalone, open source project and soon ported its elements to Windows. At the end of the year, Robert took over the project and changed its name to OpenSceneGraph. The project was then fully rewritten to take advantage of C++ standards and design patterns.
In 2001, in response to the growing interest in the project, Robert set up OpenSceneGraph Professional Services. He gave up the opportunity to work for other companies, and went full-time providing both commercial and free OSG services. Don also formed his own company, Andes Computer Engineering, and continues to support the development of OSG.
The first OpenSceneGraph birds-of-a-feather (BOF) meeting occurred the same year, at SIGGRAPH 2001, with only 12 people attending. After that, attendance at the OSG BOF continues to grow every year, with more and more people getting to know this great OpenGL-based API.
The Producer library, which was initially created to provide windowing and multi-pipe graphic system integrations for customer's needs, was added, along with other two important libraries, osgText and osgFX, in 2003. Then, in 2005, OSG 1.0 was announced, to the delight of over 1,100 members in the mailing list.
In 2007, a totally new OSG 2.0 was released, with improved multi-core, multi-GPU support, and three important new libraries: osgViewer, osgManipulator, and osgShadow. From then on, the unified build system CMake was used to simplify the build process. Then the old Producer was deprecated and maintained by Andes Computer Engineering as an independent project. The first two OSG books, OpenSceneGraph Quick Start Guide and OpenSceneGraph Reference Manuals, were available, too. Paul Martz dedicated them to all developers who were new to scene graph technology.
How time flies! Years have slipped away and OSG is developing at an incredible speed all the time: osgWidget was first introduced in 2008; osgVolume and osgAnimation came out in 2009; and osgQt was born in 2010, with the coming 3.0 release and the amazing OpenGL ES and OpenGL 3.0 support.
Today, several hundred high-performance applications are using OSG to render complex scenes and manage massive datasets. With the great efforts made by 432 core contributors and the continuous support of software developers around the world, it can be anticipated that OSG has a very bright future ahead of it.