INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATION FOR STANDARDISATION
ORGANISATION INTERNATIONALE DE NORMALISATION
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11
CODING OF MOVING PICTURES AND AUDIO

ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 N10531
Maui, USA, April 2009

Title:               MPEG 3D Graphics Vision
| Editor:           Marius Preda (Institut TELECOM)
Source:           MPEG 3D Graphics Sub-Group

Driven by the development of applications such as games, simulations and immersive environments, and thanks to continuous hardware improvements over the last few years, synthetic graphics content has become a very important media type on par with video, audio and images. Even ordinary computers can now render complex 3D graphics assets and synthetic scenes.

However, unlike video, audio and images the 3D graphics media chain remains a complex one. There are no single acquisition devices yet that are able to capture and reconstruct a synthetic 3D representation of real objects and scenes and their creation is still based on the existence of authoring tools, typically complex software programs assisting graphics artists. What is worse is that each authoring tool has its own internal data structure and there are several tens of proprietary formats for storage.

On the other hand, there is an increasing demand for network-based distribution of media, including 3D graphics coming from on-line media sharing services and distributed applications, while the complexity and 3D objects and scenes increases.

Therefore there is a need for a common standard representation of 3D graphic information supported by all authoring tools and effective compression algorithms for transmission.

The vision of "MPEG 3D Graphics" is to define a standard format for compressed 3D synthetic content. In other words to be for graphics what MP3 and AAC are for audio, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 are for video and JPEG is for still images. Additionally "MPEG 3D Graphics" aims at providing mechanisms such as APIs to enable easy integration and development of applications using its standard representation tools.The benefits of using MPEG 3D Graphics are faster and more cost-effective application development, assets reusability and perennity, more efficient storage and on-line distribution services.

The following picture illustrates the place of MPEG-4 3D Graphics in the graphics eco-system, as an interchange and distribution format for 3D graphics assets and scenes.