[1] Coin3D, like Open Inventor, is a C++ object-oriented retained mode 3D graphics API used to provide a higher layer of programming for OpenGL.

The API provides a number of common graphics rendering constructs to developers such as scene graphs to accomplish this.

According to Kongsberg Oil & Gas Technologies, the software is used in a number of commercial and open-source, scientific visualization or 3D modeling projects such as OpenRAVE.

Mid-2011, Kongsberg decided to end Coin3D as a commercial product due to diminishing demand and changing business focus.

Legacy GUI bindings are Qt (SoQt), Win32 API (SoWin) and Motif (SoXt) are also maintained.