In order to enable use of interactive tracking and steering over congested internet connections or small bandwidth modem connections, we have incorporated data compression techniques. There are currently two data compression methods employed by the steering library.

The first is a "poor man's" compression, which is used within the the library calls for tracking variables (see the documentation for the use of the function calls) to obtain regular index offsets (strides) of the specified arrays.

A more effective and useful wavelet-based 3D compression algorithm has been developed for 3D (actually 2D and higher) data compression building upon work carried out at South Carolina in collaboration with other projects. For more details, please check the 3D data compression section of PICS User Environments.