ARM Community: Develop intuitive 3D user interfaces using Mali UI Engine - ARM Community

I was talking to a customer a few months ago after he received the first validation board of their new Cortex-A9 and Mali-400 based silicon. He needed to develop and port as many applications as he could within a month to meet a demo deadline with their OEM. So he simply asked me “My boss wants me to write a leading edge 3D UI and port it to the board, do you happen to have a compelling example that you can provide me with that will allow me to meet this really short deadline?”. As it happened we actually did have one. We provided him with the Lotion UI demo we had built to demonstrate Mali GPUs capabilities and performance. He ported it within a couple of days and the demo to their OEM was a great success.

We reviewed this support case while going through the planning for the Mali Developer Centre launch. We thought that developers would find the Lotion UI example very helpful, either as a tutorial on how to write a fancy 3D UI leveraging Mali GPUs features and benefits, or to serve as a starting point to developing a more advanced 3D UI. So we decided to productize it along with the engine that was used in developing it.



After a couple of months of development, you’ll be happy to hear, as a developer ,that the Mali User Interface Engine including the Lotion UI example is now available under the Mali Developer Centre in source code and free of charge. It is a scene graph written in C++ that can be used to develop 3D applications. It provides an operating system independent set of facilities for handling I/O devices such as files and the keyboard; allows loading and managing of graphics assets including textures and OpenGL ES 2.0 shaders and provides a library of classes and functions to develop 3D User Interfaces. The Lotion UI example comes with 3 themes that take advantage of touch screens, if available, and embeds all the common features of UIs like navigation and photo menus.

The Mali UI engine and the Lotion UI are compatible with the Mali Developer Tools. You can build them on a desktop machine and run them on the OpenGL ES 2.0 Emulator or port them to a Mali GPU based development platform like the ST-Ericsson MOP500 board which you can order from the Mali Developer Centre. You can use the other tools available like the Shader Development Studio and Shader Library to work on the shaders provided with the engine or the Performance Analysis Tool to tweak the performance of the final UI running on your specific Mali based silicon.

The Mali Developer Centre support team will be happy to assist you, via the forum and we look forward to hearing your suggestions and feedback. Remember to stay tuned as more UI examples will be coming.



Nizar Romdan, the Mali Developer Tools Product Manager (& part of the Mali Ecosystem Development team), ARM, Nizar has a good knowledge in graphics and has more than 5 years of expertise in managing developer tools. Nizar has joined ARM 4 years ago and prior to that worked for STMicroelectronics as engineering manager for the tools and modelling team of ST’s bus technology. Nizar holds a masters degree in microelectronics.

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