Organization reveals roadmap in push towards global OpenUSD standardization, development, evolution, and growth; 12 new general members added: Cesium, Chaos, Epic Games, Foundry, Hexagon, IKEA, Lowe's, Meta, OTOY, SideFX, Spatial, and Unity.
Today, the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), the organization that fosters the standardization, development, evolution, and growth of OpenUSD (Universal Scene Description), unveiled the roadmap in its push towards becoming a standard. New collaborations and 12 new members were also announced.
Created by Pixar, OpenUSD is a high-performance 3D scene description technology that offers robust interoperability across tools, data, and workflows. AOUSD was launched this past August to help establish OpenUSD as an international, cross-industry standard with written specifications as part of the new roadmap that will enable greater compatibility and wider adoption, integration, and implementation.
Launch of Core Specification Roadmap
The Alliance’s two-year roadmap sets the path toward an international, cross-industry standard for integrating disparate data types to describe 3D scenes and environments.
AOUSD’s Core Specification working group will first define the foundation of OpenUSD, specifying how low-level data is structured and interpreted, ensuring portability and interoperability across software platforms and devices. Establishing a foundation means developers and users of a tool or platform that supports OpenUSD can easily access and work with their OpenUSD data consistently and predictably.
“The AOUSD mission is to promote greater interoperability of 3D tools and data, enabling developers and content creators - including all of us at Pixar - to describe, compose, and simulate large-scale projects and build an ever-widening range of 3D-enabled products and services,” said Steve May, Pixar chief technology officer and AOUSD chairperson. “The new roadmap shared today shows the progress the alliance is making and unveils milestones and planned expansions over the next year to ensure interoperability and collaboration.”
AOUSD can iterate further on the foundations laid by the Core Specification work group, building rules, and guidelines for higher-level data types like 3D meshes and materials. The Alliance aims to deliver final approval of the core specification at the end of 2025.
AOUSD Announces New Members and Collaborations
Demand for interoperability across 3D workflows continues to drive interest in the Alliance for OpenUSD across industries. AOUSD has welcomed 12 new general members: Cesium; Chaos; Epic Games; Foundry; Hexagon; IKEA; Lowe's; Meta; OTOY; SideFX; Spatial; and Unity.
"We’ve already seen how powerful USD can be for VFX and animation customers, both for moving data between different applications and general scene assembly,” commented Chaos head of innovation Vladimir Koylazov. “And it doesn’t have to stop there. Our design customers can benefit just as much. We are happy to lend our expertise and join our peers in helping shape these standards so more people can apply them to their day-to-day workflows and projects going forward."
“Building key interoperability for the metaverse will require an industry-wide focus on common standards, formats, and protocols,” added Meta VP XR Tech Amir Frenkel. “The Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) can help drive the collaboration that’s needed to make this possible, and Meta is dedicated to this work. Creators, developers, and companies will benefit from the technologies and experiences that will be made possible by open standards for 3D content.”
AOUSD also announced a new liaison relationship with the Khronos Group, which will foster better support within the community through sharing ideas and support.
The Khronos Group and AOUSD will collaborate to maximize alignment and interoperability between OpenUSD for advanced 3D scene composition and authoring, and Khronos’ glTF, a widely adopted 3D asset open standard for efficient delivery and loading of 3D scenes on diverse platforms, including the web. This collaboration will help coordinate the roadmaps of OpenUSD and glTF to avoid needless incompatibilities and better enable interoperation between the two technologies to facilitate powerful tooling pipelines that generate sophisticated 3D content that can be pervasively experienced on a wide range of platforms and engines.
Source: AOUSD
Debbie Diamond Sarto is news editor at Animation World Network.
