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5.4. Storing Images and Textures 107
Experts Group) format. Other formats that frequently crop up are the PNG
(Portable Network Graphics) and GIF (Graphics Interchange Format). Read-
ily available software libraries that encode and decode these files into raw
24-bit pixel arrays can be easily integrated with any VR application. We show
how to do this in quite a few of the utilities and application programs de-
scribed in Part II.
Nevertheless, it is useful to have an appreciation of the organization of
the file storage, so that it can be adapted to suit special circumstances, such as
stereoscopic imaging, which we discuss in Chapters 10 and 16.
5.4.1 JPEG Storage Format
It is generally accepted that for storing photographs the lossy compression ...