Universal 3D

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Universal 3D (U3D) is a compressed file format for 3D data.

The format was defined by a special consortium called 3D Industry Forum that brought together a diverse group of companies and organizations, including Intel, Boeing, HP, Adobe, Bentley Systems, Right Hemisphere and others whose main focus had been the promotional development of 3D graphics for use in various industries, specifically at this time manufacturing as well as construction and industrial plant design. The format was later standardized by Ecma International in August 2005 as Ecma-363. The goal is a universal standard for three-dimensional data of all kinds, to facilitate data exchange. The consortium promoted also the development of an open source library for facilitating the adoption of the format. The format is natively supported by the PDF format and 3D objects in U3D format can be inserted into PDF documents and interactively visualized by Acrobat Reader (since version 7). PDF with embedded U3D objects can be created by means of Pdftex with the movie15 package.

Adobe Acrobat 7, Adobe Reader, Photoshop CS3, Poser 7, DAZ|Studio and MeshLab support U3D.

[edit] See also

• COLLADA
• X3D
• 3DMLW (3D Markup Language for Web)

[edit] External links

• ECMA-363: Universal 3D File Format official specifications of the format
• Universal 3D Sample Software: an open source library for reading and creating U3D files.