Looking for an open world/3D renderer for AR rendering that can handle a lot of Polygons, textures and lighting. We don't need a game engine with physics and all that as it is but down the line, physics might be handy. A lot of the renderers like Ogre3D do too much file handling - we need something more bare bones.
OpenGL is what we are using but we would like something more powerful.
Surely AR would be scene based? You've recognised an object through VR, you want to display a note near it, it would be much easier to specify that relative to the object (scene based) than relative to the bottom/left/close corner of the image (world space).
Not in the same "scene" sense that you have dedicated levels like in a game that load statically. With AR, you are generally putting an arbitrary model into the 3D rendering environment and then using different sensors to "place" it accurately.
Traditional game engines want you to build levels/scenes inside of their editors like Unity, as opposed to being an open engine that you can feed in real time from a separate library.
So yes, AR is based on the scene you are "shooting" at the time, but not the same way that game engines are built to be generally static at the time of loading.
I understand what you're saying - you need dynamic environments. Minor terminology quip (which might make discussion easier in future): that's a very different concern with being 'scene based', which is a specific term the 3D industry uses to mean 'items are located relative to their parents in a tree shaped data structure called a scene graph, and not absolutely positioned in world space'.
OpenGL is what we are using but we would like something more powerful.