COLLADA

Collada is an open standard XML-based schema designed to enable the interchange of digital assets among interactive 3D applications. It provides a comprehensive data model for describing 3D scenes, including geometry, textures, materials, lighting, animation, rigging (skin), cameras, and physics, in a platform- and tool-agnostic format. The primary file extension is .dae, short for Digital Asset Exchange.

The format was originally developed in the early 2000s by Sony Computer Entertainment’s Open Technologies division to facilitate the exchange of 3D assets between content creation tools. The specification was released as an open standard and is maintained by the Khronos Group. Tools such as Blender, Autodesk Maya, and 3ds Max, among others, offer import and export for Collada, enabling interoperability across software pipelines. Collada files are XML text files describing assets in a hierarchical scene graph.

In practice, Collada is used for asset exchange rather than as a runtime data format in engines; it has seen use in game development, film, and visualization pipelines. However, in recent years, more compact and streaming-friendly formats such as glTF have grown in popularity for real-time web and mobile applications, leading to a relative decline in Collada’s prominence. Nonetheless, Collada remains supported by several tools and continues to be used where explicit, tool-agnostic interchange of detailed scene data is required.