pinocchio VS GLM

Open-loop walking + physics: (e.g. ZMP-based) one thing you can do (that does not imply adding an IMU to Kayra and going for feedback) is include some walking physics into your walking trajectory generation. To give you an idea, I've written a tutorial on doing that in Python a couple of years ago. The libraries in this tutorial are deprecated now, but I'm working on an equivalent stack at github.com/tasts-robots using more durable software like pinocchio. The libs are still WIP but if you are interested in exploring that dev path (i.e. making a ZMP-based trajectory generator for Kayra) I can support you and help adapt them (because I want that SW to be useful for a maximum number of people).

Drake and Pinocchio both use the Python interface to Meshcat as an option for visualizing robots, and they can both do the forward kinematics and have visualizer components that place the visual meshes properly relative to the computed frames, but both of those are full-fledged and complex kinematics and dynamics libraries for contact-rich interaction (and more), so the API calls to get a model set up are doing a lot more than providing a visual model you can feed joint angles to.

Pinocchio sounds like exactly what you need: https://github.com/stack-of-tasks/pinocchio

I am a greenhorn at graphics programming. I just made an app in OpenGL with C++ that I now need to change over to a browser app with WebGL. WebGL looks pretty cool but since my app does a lot of calculations I assumed I should keep the heavier calculating parts in C++ with emscripten ( which I am also just learning ). So looking at it, it just looks like glm is the only library I seriously need for my c++ code and that seems pretty cool because it is a header only app it says. But in the github there are a lot of folders and files so I am not sure which are indispensable or not. Any advice?

GLM does it quite well, it has core includes then a detail folder with all the inl files that get added. https://github.com/g-truc/glm

I once ported an OpenGL code base over to Metal. For me, it was essential to do as much code sharing as possible. Because I was using the GLM library in that code base and generally found that library very useful I wanted to know whether I can use GLM with Metal. I had to do some research but it turned out it works really well, see here

I would also recommend GLM

Alongside MiniEngine, you’ll want to look into the DirectX Toolkit. This is a set of utilities by Microsoft that simplify graphics and game development. It contains libraries like DirectXMesh for parsing and optimizing meshes for DX12, or DirectXMath which handles 3D math operations like the OpenGL library glm. It also has utilities for gamepad input or sprite fonts. You can see a list of the headers here to get an idea of the features. You’ll definitely want to include this in your project if you don’t want to think about a lot of these solved problems (and don’t have to worry about cross-platform support).