Ply is a ruby gem for reading Stanford PLY-format 3D model files. The PLY file format is a flexible format for storing semi-structured binary data, and is often used to stored polygonalized 3D models generated with range scanning hardware. You can find some examples of the format at the {Stanford 3D Scanning Repository}[http://graphics.stanford.edu/data/3Dscanrep/]. Ply provides a simple API for quick access to the data in a PLY file (including examining the structure of a particular file's content), and an almost-as-simple event-driven API which can be used to process extremely large ply files in a streaming fashion, without needing to keep the full dataset represented in the file in memory. Ply handles all three types of PLY files (ascii, binary-big-endian and binary-little-endian). If you don't have any Stanford PLY files on hand, you probably don't need this gem, but if you're curious, the PLY file format is described at Wikipedia[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLY_(file_format)].