AbstractIn engineering education/training, virtual modeling and realistic simulation are widely used by instructors due to complexity, cost, and time. There is no universally agreed standard in the current state of robotics for both academic and industrial practice. This forces authors to re‐implement requisite parts. Even for well‐defined approaches, algorithms are being recomposed without any new contribution. Motivated from these concerns and discussions, the virtual tool, MFOCV, is introduced in order to encourage the use of open‐source libraries. Without struggling the complexity, discarding with re‐implementation of admitted methods MFOCV is designed to investigate camera parameters and basic transformation which are the initial steps for the localization and 3D reconstruction. With the utilization of open‐source libraries it is expected that the interests on open architecture will grow and robotics attract more new researchers/groups. MFOCV enables user to observe effects of different camera parameters simultaneously on real images. The presented tool can be used not only for parameter auditing in lectures but also in instrumental localization problems in operative projects. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 21: 147–157, 2013