The ability to quickly and reliably transmit 3-D images over the Internet could make everything from shopping for real estate to playing video games a lot more "real." Imagine clothing companies transmitting 3-D body scans of their customers to a factory where tailored goods are made and shipped directly to the customer. Real estate firms could offer sophisticated virtual tours of homes on the Web, where a potential buyer could "walk" into a house, move furniture around and even tear down walls.

But for the average Web user with a 56K modem, downloading complex 3-D images off the Internet remains cumbersome, with long delays and unexpected crashes. To make 3-D virtual objects more widely available on the Internet, a team of researchers from Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs and Caltech have demonstrated a way of compressing "digital geometry" that allows 3-D data to be downloaded much faster and more efficiently than is possible with current standards.