Major features and improvements:

• Added Phong shading with configurable lighting for scenes and objects (#500, #515, #489).
• Added image dataset extraction API (#483, #516).
• Added the support of navigation metrics and shortest path calculation for custom agent configuration with recomputation of navmesh for non standard agent size. (#466).
• Improved rendering speed by 1.2x on MP3D, 3.3x on MP3D semantic. 2.7x on Replica, 2.9x on Replica semantic, using optimized frustum culling. (#400, #449, #473, #481, #517, #521)
• 50x speed up of RGB & Depth noise models used for sim2real transfer (#548)
• Speed and correctness improvements to multi-goal geodesic distance computation (#465 #555)
• Added RigidObject VelocityControl utility for dynamic and kinematic specification of constant object linear and angular velocity (#464, #486, #571, #591).
• Added option to consider MotionType::STATIC RigidObject meshes when recomputing NavMesh (#538).
• Added option to attach an existing SceneNode to a newly instanced RigidObject as a simple interface to enable dynamic agent embodiment (#492).
• Allow NavMesh sliding in Habitat-sim to be turned off (#439).
• Improved GreedyGeodesicFollower with local motion primitive planning for better performance with action noise and no sliding (#546).
• Nightly build of docs and tutorials; nightly and deployment to Habitat website (#615, #624, #630)

Other improvements and bug fixes:

• Added tutorial for RigidObject interactions API (#611).
• Added tutorial for configurable lighting API (#528).
• Added tutorial for image data extraction API (#518, #535, #539).
• Improved default material parameters for objects (#596).
• Added support for normal maps in glTF assets (#550).
• Improved support for texture mipmaps (#505).
• Improved rendering performance on semantic meshes via splitting and culling (#521).
• Fixed a collision bug with MotionType::STATIC RigidObjects (#536).
• Extend python bindings for oriented bounding boxes and fix bug in computeOrientedBoundingBoxes (#493).
• Added python bindings for computing/querying SceneNode bounding boxes (#497).
• Objects loaded by directory batch into the object template library are now consistently sorted (#479).
• Fix glTF object miss-classification as MP3D assets and corresponding world frame rotation (#592).
• Added OBB parsing for Replica dataset (#503)
• Physics simulation bug fixes and stability improvements (#599).
• Added python bindings to save a NavMesh to file (#619).
• Added Simulator function to toggle bounding box render for objects (#610).
• Can now build habitat-sim in directories with spaces in the path (#482)

Corresponding Habitat-API v0.1.5 release.

Kudos to our community contributors: @pushkalkatara, @Danmou