Google Partners With Pixar To Enhance 3D Asset Delivery
We seem to have grown bored of the world around us and since 1992, people have been looking at ways to enhance our natural environment or replacement it altogether through VR and AR technologies.
But despite its many possibilities, reality manipulating technologies haven’t really taken off with either idea proofing to be a tougher nut to crack than previously anticipated.
You might think if anyone could crack open the VR puzzle, it’d be Google but even with the backing of its behemoth resource capacity, the company fluffed two attempts at VR.
However, the failures that stem from Google Cardboard or even Daydream VR hasn’t completely diminished the company’s interest with Google recently partnering with Pixar to combine their open-source 3D scene description tool and file format developed by the latter with Draco Compression.
Draco (also an open-source platform) is a 3D assets library whose main function is to help with compressing and decompressing of the sometimes resource-intense 3D geometric meshes and point clouds.
On the other hand, Universal Scene Description or USD for short was pioneered by Animation company Pixar and its aim is to address the need to robustly and scalably interchange and augment arbitrary 3D scenes that may be composed of many models and animations.
Bringing USD and Draco together means applications can present complex 3D assets to the end-user much more quickly without compromising visual fidelity.
If the collaboration works as intended, users will be able to load 3D graphics a lot quicker or download apps faster even on slow bandwidth
Google tested the new tool and found out that Draco on average compressed objects by more than 15X and those assets were able to load 2.5X faster on any typical 4G network.
The code is freely available on Github.
