Most visual simulators (that I'm familiar with) focuses on simulating sceneries while the viewer's position and orientation changes in a three-dimensional space. Terrain engines used in flight simulators are a prime example. Arcade games like car racing and Doom-like first-man shooter games also use this type of visual scene simulators.

The goal of this project is to develop a general-purpose visual simulator whose focus is on simulating the three-dimensional views of semi-stationary objects rather than the sceneries. The viewed object (or groups of objects) can be either stationary in space or in motion, but the viewer's focus will always be in the object itself. For example, if you are interested in learning how a horse gallops, then you might want to attach a camera onto some sort of equipment with sliding rails, which is in turn tied on the horse itself in some way so that you can view the horse from different angles while the horse is moving. Visual Object Simulator™ will provide a virtual environment for this type of experiments.

The simulator will be written in C++ using OpenGL. Development will be done mostly on Windows, but GLUT will be used for windowing level abstraction so that it can be ported to different platforms with minimal effort.