Alliance for OpenUSD Unveils Roadmap for Core USD Specification and Ecosystem Collaboration

AOUSD grows with 12 new general members: Cesium, Chaos, Epic Games, Foundry, Hexagon, IKEA, Lowe's, Meta, OTOY, SideFX, Spatial and Unity; Forms New Liaison Relationship with the Khronos Group

SIGGRAPH, Sydney, Australia—December 13, 2023—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.

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.

AOUSD Announces New Members and Collaboration

Demand for interoperability across 3D workflows continues to drive interest in the Alliance for OpenUSD across industries. AOUSD is proud to welcome 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.

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. 

Supporting Quotes from New Members:

"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. 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." - Vladimir Koylazov, Head of Innovation at Chaos

“Joining the Alliance for OpenUSD is an exciting moment in Lowe’s journey to becoming a world-class omnichannel retailer. Our team has a long history of building transformative home improvement experiences with 3D, and we believe that interoperable standards can shape the open-source 3D web of the future.” - Mason Sheffield, senior director, creative technology at Lowe’s Innovation Labs

“Building key interoperability for the metaverse will require an industry-wide focus on common standards, formats and protocols. 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.” - Amir Frenkel, VP XR Tech at Meta

“At OTOY, we strongly believe open standards promote a highly collaborative environment for artists to streamline their workflow across multiple DCC tools and platforms. OpenUSD serves to expand interoperability in the industry and we look forward to helping strengthen it as an internationally recognized standard.” - Jules Urbach, CEO of OTOY, Inc.

“Spatial is excited to be partnering with the Alliance for OpenUSD building on our deep expertise in immersive audio augmented reality experiences. Our upcoming OpenUSD native tools aim to radically accelerate the creative workflows of teams around the world that are developing next generation fully immersive experiences.” - Calin Pacurariu, Co-Founder & CEO at Spatial 

View additional quotes from Cesium, Epic Games, Foundry, Hexagon, IKEA, SideFX, and Unity here.

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About Alliance for OpenUSD 

The Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) is an open organization dedicated to fostering the interoperability of 3D content through OpenUSD (Universal Scene Description) to enable developers and content creators to more easily describe, compose, and simulate large-scale 3D projects. The Alliance brings together a diverse and inclusive community to provide an open forum for collaborative development and discussion around the standardization, development, and growth of OpenUSD.

Media Contact:

pr@aousd.org