With the expansion of the web and the emergence of technologies like WebGL, the desire to enable interactive 3D content on websites and web applications has increased dramatically. This requires a format that can seamlessly integrate with web technologies. Many existing formats are either too large or not well-suited for real-time rendering and web delivery.
Khronos Group, a consortium of companies focused on creating open standards for the graphics and multimedia industry, developed GLTF to overcome this requirement.
GLTF, short for "GL Transmission Format," is an open standard file format for 3D graphics that is designed to be compact and efficient for transmitting and rendering 3D scenes and models.
The first mention of this file format dates back to SIGGRAPH 2012 and was originally referred to as WebGL Transmissions Format (WebGL TF), and then came into use from October 19, 2015, along with the announcement of the glTF 1.0 specification. At the moment, the 2nd version of the specification (glTF 2.0) is in use, which was released on March 3, 2017. For the purpose of this article, we will only focus on glTF 2.0.
Nowadays glTF and GLB formats are used on Sketchfab (autoconverting), Facebook (3D posts), Microsoft, Oculus, Unreal Engine and others.