Texture baking
Pre-computing lighting or detail into a texture so a web model looks rich while staying light.
Baking takes something expensive to compute, the soft shadow where a cushion meets a frame, the fine detail of a sculpted surface, and stores it as an image wrapped around the model. The web viewer then just shows the image instead of calculating the effect, which keeps the model fast.
Ambient occlusion baking is the common case for furniture: the shading in the seams and folds is baked once, so the model has depth without needing the phone to compute it in real time. Normal map baking carries the detail of a high-polygon model onto a low-polygon one.
It is part of the optimisation step, and one of the reasons a well-prepared web model looks better than its polygon count suggests.
See also
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