Meet Google’s Draco: Compression library for 3D graphics
Google’s Chrome Media team has announced a new open source project called “Draco” designed for 3D graphics. For those unfamiliar, Google has always been an important contributor to the open source community.
Draco is a library for compressing and decompressing 3D geometric meshes and point clouds. In other words, it radically reduces the size of 3D graphic files without any substantial visual impact to the person viewing. It is also intended to enhance the storage and transmission of 3D graphics.
Explaining Draco, Jamieson Brettle and Frank Galligan, from Chrome Media Team, Google said, “Draco was designed and built for compression efficiency and speed. The code supports compressing points, connectivity information, texture coordinates, color information, normals, and any other generic attributes associated with geometry. With Draco, applications using 3D graphics can be significantly smaller without compromising visual fidelity. For users, this means apps can now be downloaded faster, 3D graphics in the browser can load quicker, and VR and AR scenes can now be transmitted with a fraction of the bandwidth and rendered quickly and look fantastic.”
Draco is released as C++ source code that can be used to compress 3D graphics as well as C++ and Javascript decoders for the encoded data.
Check out Draco in action below. You can also view the code of the open source project on GitHub here.
