Industry giants Apple, Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA have teamed up with the Joint Development Foundation (JDF), an affiliate of the Linux Foundation, to announce the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD).
The aim of alliance is to promote the standardisation, development, and evolution of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (USD) technology. USD is a high-performance 3D scene description technology developed by Pixar Animation Studios that enables robust interchange between digital content creation tools with its expanding set of schemas, covering domains like geometry, shading, lighting, and physics.
The core objective of AOUSD is to standardise the 3D ecosystem by advancing the capabilities of Open Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD). This advancement will enable greater interoperability among 3D tools and data, empowering developers and content creators to describe, compose, and simulate large-scale 3D projects and build an ever-widening range of 3D-enabled products and services. The initiative also seeks to develop written specifications detailing the features of OpenUSD. This will enable greater compatibility and wider adoption, integration, and implementation, and allows inclusion by other standards bodies into their specifications. The Linux Foundation’s JDF was chosen to house the project, as it will enable open, efficient, and effective development of OpenUSD specifications, while providing a path to recognition through the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
AOUSD will also provide the primary forum for the collaborative definition of enhancements to the technology by the greater industry. The alliance invites a broad range of companies and organisations to join and participate in shaping the future of OpenUSD.
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Steve May, Chief Technology Officer at Pixar and Chairperson of AOUSD, stated, “Universal Scene Description was invented at Pixar and is the technological foundation of our state-of-the-art animation pipeline… With the announcement of AOUSD, we signal the exciting next step: the continued evolution of OpenUSD as a technology and its position as an international standard.”
Guido Quaroni, Senior Director of Engineering, 3D&I at Adobe, expressed enthusiasm for the technology, saying, “OpenUSD was created to be one of these ‘multipliers’ and we are excited to see a diverse group of companies joining together to support this innovative and open technology.”
“Whether you’re building CG worlds or digital twins or looking ahead to the 3D web, content creators need a cohesive way to collaborate and share data across tools, services, and platforms,” said Gordon Bradley, Fellow, Media & Entertainment, Autodesk. “Autodesk is excited to support the Alliance for OpenUSD as it drives 3D interoperability for visual effects, animation, and beyond, and supports our vision to help customers design and make a better world.”
“OpenUSD gives 3D developers, artists, and designers the complete foundation to tackle large-scale industrial, digital content creation, and simulation workloads with broad multi-app interoperability,” said Guy Martin, Director of Open Source and Standards at NVIDIA. “This alliance is a unique opportunity to accelerate OpenUSD collaboration globally by building formal standards across industries and initiatives to realise 3D worlds and industrial digitalisation.”
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