Alliance for OpenUSD Announces New Members, Inclusive Language Guide, and Core Specification Progress

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — August 11, 2025 — The Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) today announced eight new general members, key progress across multiple Working Groups and Interest Groups, and the publication of a new Inclusive Language Guide developed in collaboration with the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF). These milestones reflect the continued growth and commitment of the OpenUSD community to technical excellence, accessibility, and inclusivity.

Formed in 2023, AOUSD is an organization dedicated to fostering the standardization, development, evolution, and growth of OpenUSD, an extensible framework for describing, composing, simulating, and collaboratively navigating and constructing 3D scenes.

AOUSD Welcomes New Members

AOUSD is proud to welcome eight new general members: Accenture, Esri, HCLTech, Intrinsic, PTC, Renault, Tech Soft 3D, and The Coca-Cola Company. These organizations bring a wide range of expertise across industrial software, automotive innovation, global consumer brands, GIS, enterprise services, media and entertainment, and immersive audio technologies. Their participation underscores the rapidly expanding interest in OpenUSD and its potential to unify 3D workflows across industries. Learn more about becoming a member of AOUSD.

Build Interest Group

AOUSD has launched the Build Interest Group to improve the developer experience and reduce friction across OpenUSD’s build systems and tooling. The group will explore improvements to build processes, packaging, CI/CD, onboarding, and integration workflows, with the goal of lowering the barrier to entry for the community. Early priorities include support for additional platforms and deployment recipes, improving installation options via common package managers, and streamlining documentation, testing, and release workflows. 

Working Groups Updates 

Technical Advisory Committee

The Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) has been working to provide oversight for projects, including reviews of materials from each group, guidance on new charters, and best practices for how projects work in concert with each other. The TAC also works on aligning needs between members for future AOUSD and OpenUSD developments like Profiles, a declarative approach to harnessing OpenUSD’s flexibility into categorized extensibility and interoperability, and considerations around compatibility of data as the projects evolve.

Core Specification Working Group 

The Core Specification Working Group completed and approved its draft deliverable of Core Spec 1.0, following two balloting periods.

The process revealed key blockers and yielded valuable lessons both for the process and what features and clarifications matter most in the initial scope of the specification,  which guided key improvements. These include revamping the value resolution algorithm, refining specifications for Collections and Color Spaces, and introducing clearer pseudocode and guidance for implementers.

A new compliance rubric helps implementers determine their conformance to the specification. Voting procedures and documentation workflows have also been streamlined to improve future balloting. The draft deliverable will now undergo a 60-day Intellectual Property Rights Review and a 30-day review by the Technical Advisory Committee ahead of final approval by the Steering Committee.

Early access to the Working Group’s sample implementations and compliance testing in development that supplement Core Spec 1.0 is available here. Feedback on these implementations and tests is welcome on forum.aousd.org.

New Release of OpenUSD

OpenUSD v25.08 is now available and marks an important milestone for three new features that revolutionize how 3D content is created, animated, and rendered with OpenUSD.

Spline Animation is now fully functional and brings professional-grade animation capabilities with tangent controls and a new Spline Viewer in usdview to enable robust animation interchange between applications. 

UsdImaging 2.0 is also now at feature parity. This new imaging framework introduces the concept of scene indices and replaces the HdSceneDelegate class from UsdImaging 1.0 with a new scene index, along with new Hydra features and components built around the scene index API. UsdImaging 2.0 also includes new plugin points for proceduralism.

OpenUSD v25.08 is the first preview release of OpenExec now that it has reached its minimally featured product milestone. OpenExec provides a general-purpose framework for expressing and evaluating computational behaviors in an OpenUSD scene.

New OpenUSD Development Certification

To address the growing demand for USD expertise, NVIDIA is also introducing a new cross-industry OpenUSD Development certification. Recognized by AOUSD members such as Pixar, Adobe, Autodesk, and NVIDIA and supported by industry leaders, this professional credential validates a developer’s ability to build, maintain, and optimize 3D content pipelines using OpenUSD. 

Interest Groups Updates 

Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) Interest Group

The DEI Interest Group has completed its year-one goals, including finalizing the Inclusive Language Guide in collaboration with ASWF’s D&I leads and presenting a list of future initiatives to the Steering Committee in April. Current efforts focus on standing up a dedicated DEI section on AOUSD website, exploring use cases for the new AccessibilityAPI schema, evaluating participation in ASWF’s Dev Days, and initiating outreach to educational institutions to expand OpenUSD learning opportunities.

Inclusive Language Guide Now Available

As part of its year-one milestones, the DEI Interest Group has collaborated with Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) to publish a new Inclusive Language Guide, now available to the community. This guide offers practical recommendations to help developers and writers identify and replace non-inclusive terminology in codebases and documentation. By promoting more thoughtful, inclusive language practices, the guide supports a culture where differences are respected and embraced. Topics covered include socially charged language, gendered terms, ableist phrasing, and more. The guide is intended as a starting point for ongoing conversations around inclusive development practices across the OpenUSD ecosystem.

Supporting Quotes from New Members

Accenture 

Accenture Joins AOUSD to Advance Open 3D Standards in Global Manufacturing

August 2025 — Accenture, a global leader in engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain services, is excited to join AOUSD, the Alliance for Open Universal Scene Description. We are proud to support the development of OpenUSD as a unified, open standard for 3D content creation and exchange.

This collaboration plays a critical role in helping companies design and build factories in the U.S. and worldwide. By leveraging OpenUSD, we can accelerate large-scale capital programs through advanced virtualization, immersive simulation, and the adoption of autonomous manufacturing capabilities. Open standards like OpenUSD are key to enabling collaboration, interoperability, and innovation across industries—and we’re proud to help lead that evolution. 

– Prasad Satyavolu, Accenture Manufacturing Lead for Americas.

The Coca-Cola Company

"Innovation is at the heart of The Coca-Cola Company. Joining the Alliance for OpenUSD is a decisive step into the future of digital interaction and brand storytelling. OpenUSD provides a common language for 3D content that will unlock unprecedented opportunities. We are excited to explore how this technology can help us create more personalized, engaging, and immersive experiences for our consumers around the world, from photorealistic digital product twins to interactive brand worlds and beyond.”

– Samir Bhutada, Global VP of Digital Transformation (StudioX), The Coca-Cola Company

Esri

“Esri is thrilled to join AOUSD and contribute to the evolution of the OpenUSD format by bringing native spatial awareness - enabling better integration of 3D content from creation platforms into geospatial workflows. As a global leader in GIS since 1969, Esri is deeply committed to interoperability and open standards. Our ArcGIS platform, trusted by over 700,000 organizations worldwide, supports vital decision-making across sectors such as environmental management, government, urban planning, utilities, and transportation.  A foundational element of geospatial workflows is the use of coordinate reference systems (CRS) to define location. Esri looks forward to sharing its expertise and leadership in this area with the OpenUSD community.”

– Jim McKinney, CTO ArcGIS Desktop Development

Intrinsic

“Intrinsic is excited to become a member of the Alliance for OpenUSD. As our team investigated integrating OpenUSD into our developer environment, Flowstate, we saw the clear benefits of standards for robotics and automation. We believe the OpenUSD standard will help to improve the efficiency of bringing an idea for simulation-to-real, thanks to consistency in digital twins, material properties, physics simulation, and more. We look forward to collaboration across the Alliance, including with partners like NVIDIA, and continuing to look for ways to bring OpenUSD into our work.”

 – Daniel Kamerling, Group Product Manager at Intrinsic

PTC

"PTC is proud to join the Alliance for OpenUSD to help drive and reinforce our commitment to open standards. These standards can help manufacturers and product companies address the growing complexity and unique engineering challenges associated with many of today's products. We look forward to seeing the continued evolution and adoption of OpenUSD and continuing to support our customers as they design, manufacture, and maintain the products the world relies on." 

– Amit Jain, Chief Strategy Officer, PTC

Renault

"Renault Group as a tech company is very proud to announce its membership of the Alliance for OpenUSD. In our competitive industry, digital transformation and digital simulation are key to reducing lead times and producing the best quality products for our end customers. Since 2023, we have been using OpenUSD more and more to achieve better data interoperability and optimized workflows. We've gone from digital continuity to collaborative design !  As the first carmaker to join the alliance, it's now time to contribute to the evolution and standardization of OpenUSD, and to encourage other manufacturers to join us." 

– Benoît DESCHAMPS - Expert Virtual MockUp & eXtended Reality, Renault

Tech Soft 3D

“At Tech Soft 3D, our mission has always been to empower developers and engineers to fully harness the value of 3D engineering data. Joining the Alliance for OpenUSD aligns perfectly with that vision. We believe open standards are essential to unlocking innovation, collaboration, and accessibility across industries. We’re thrilled to contribute our expertise and actively support the Alliance’s efforts to build an open, interoperable future for 3D.” 

– Gavin Bridgeman, CTO and Co-Founder, Tech Soft 3D

HCLTech

“At HCLTech, we are proud to join the Alliance for OpenUSD for the advancement and standardization of OpenUSD formats to unlock the full potential of Physical AI. We view OpenUSD as a vital bridge between design and engineering workflows, enhancing interoperability across digital twins, simulation platforms, and AI-powered physical systems. Leveraging our deep expertise and leadership in AI-driven transformation, we are committed to driving AOSD’s mission forward with meaningful impact. ” 

– Tamas Foldi, Head of Kinetic AI, HCLTech

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About the Alliance of OpenUSD 

The Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) is an open organization dedicated to fostering the interoperability of 3D content through OpenUSD 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.