The Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), an organization dedicated to fostering the standardization, development, evolution, and growth of OpenUSD (Universal Scene Description), today unveiled its roadmap toward becoming a standard, as well as a new collaboration and a dozen new members. The announcement came out of SIGGRAPH Asia, taking place in Sydney, Australia this week (December 12-15).
Created by Pixar, OpenUSD is a high-performance 3D scene description technology that offers robust interoperability across tools, data, and workflows. AOUSD, launched in August, is establishing 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 out the path toward becoming an international, cross-industry standard for interoperability of 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 will be able to 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, Chief Technology Officer at Pixar and Chairperson of AOUSD. “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.
New Members & Collaboration
Demand for interoperability across 3D workflows continues to drive interest in the Alliance for OpenUSD across industries. AOUSD now welcomes 12 new general members: Cesium, Chaos, Epic Games, Foundry, Hexagon, IKEA, Lowe’s, Meta, OTOY, SideFX, Spatial and Unity. AOUSD has also announced a new liaison relationship with the Khronos Group, which will foster better support within the community through the sharing of ideas and support.
“Being a member of AOUSD allows us to participate in the creation of the specifications for USD and related projects, which is of huge importance to our customers,” said Vladimir Koylazov, Co-Founder and Head of Innovation at Chaos. “Taking part in the alliance will also help us to continue improving our products as we gain a forum to discuss in detail changes requested by both our own development teams and our customers. We are looking forward to exchanging ideas and discussing challenges with all the members of AOUSD.”
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 robust tooling pipelines that generate sophisticated 3D content that can be pervasively experienced on a wide range of platforms and engines.
“The Khronos Group warmly welcomes AOUSD to the community of open standard organizations. We look forward to a close cooperation so that Khronos standards, including glTF, can support and synergize with AOUSD’s mission for the good of the industry,” commented Neil Trevett, President of The Khronos Group and VP of Developer Ecosystems at NVIDIA
Learn more at aousd.org.
