Coding with ASCII: compact, yet text-based 3D content

Because of the convenience of a text-based format 3D content is often published in form of a gzipped file that contains an ASCII description of the scene graph. While compressed image, audio, and video data is kept in separate binary files, polygon meshes and interpolators are usually included uncompressed into the ASCII description, as there is no widely-accepted standard for such data. In this paper we show how to use compressed polygon meshes and compressed interpolators within a purely textbased format. Our scheme codes these data-heavy nodes as ASCII strings that compress well with standard gzip compression. Specifically we demonstrate the efficiency of this technique on a sparse scene composed of many small polygon meshes. While typical for 3D content on the Web, such scenes tend to be more difficult to compress.