The data storage format supports a relatively simple description of a single object as a list of nominally flat polygons.
A variety of properties can be stored, including color and transparency, surface normals, texture coordinates and data confidence values.
The elements are usually vertices and faces, but may include other entities such as edges, samples of range maps, and triangle strips.
The type can be specified with one of char uchar short ushort int uint float double, or one of int8 uint8 int16 uint16 int32 uint32 float32 float64.
For an object with ten polygonal faces, one might see: PLY implementations vary wildly in the property names.
The PLY format was developed in the mid-90s by Greg Turk and others in the Stanford graphics lab under the direction of Marc Levoy.
The vertex list contains position (x,y,z), normals (nx,ny,nz) and texture coordinates (s,t) for each of the 14 vertices.