A short experience report on the opengl standard used on a (pentium) PC, by using the meta (source level) package.
As a graphics language, opengl is basically a set of C libs and includes that provide 'basic' graphics functinality: opening windows/viewports, a range of 2d/3d primitives up until nurbs, 3d texture mapping, interactor feedback mechanisms, some lower level calls, etc.
Is is available and source-level compatible over PC and workstations.
I took the 'robot' example, and worked at it a bit, and in some hours it did what I wanted it to do: to have a three degrees of freedom, goureaud shaded, double buffered image in real time.
Currently I'm working on including the 'picking' mechanism, which does work already, inside the 'robot' application, to have all main 3D mechanisms availble, and with some of the other techniques and packages can give some quite powerful environment (completely (?) standard, and highly portable).