Alliance for OpenUSD Announces New Member Milestones and Industrial Momentum Following Core Specification 1.0

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — March 25, 2026 — The Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) today unveiled a strategic expansion of its technical roadmap through the formation of the Characters, Motion, and Interactivity (CMI) Interest Group, alongside the addition of seven new general members. This momentum highlights the continued growth and adoption of OpenUSD as the foundational standard for 3D interoperability across industries following the recent landmark ratification of Core Specification 1.0.

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

New Members

AOUSD’s newest general members include Aras, Booz Allen Hamilton, C-Infinity, Mobiltech, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., SGDL Innovation, and XGRIDS. These members join a diverse and growing community of industry leaders committed to driving the interoperability of 3D content across the global ecosystem, bringing expertise in sectors ranging from energy management and telecommunications to advanced 3D simulation.

New Interest Groups Drive Industry-Specific Innovation

To address the evolving needs of the 3D ecosystem, AOUSD has launched the Characters, Motion, and Interactivity (CMI) Interest Group. This group is dedicated to extending OpenUSD’s capabilities beyond static environments, focusing on the standardization of skeletal animation, blend shapes, and interactive behaviors. By establishing common schemas for how characters move and react within a scene, the CMI Interest Group ensures that complex digital assets remain portable and functional across different engines, from cinematic production to real-time industrial simulations.

“With the foundation of Core Spec 1.0 now in place, the industry’s focus is shifting toward a joint strategy for dynamic, complex content," said Steve May (CTO of Pixar Animation Studios). "The CMI Interest Group is a vital forum for members to define requirements and build the roadmap for how characters and motion move across the ecosystem, ensuring that the 'HTML of 3D' is as interactive as it is interoperable.”

The formation of this group follows the successful foundation laid by existing interest groups and working groups in Materials, Geometry, and Physics, further solidifying OpenUSD as the comprehensive language for the next generation of 3D content. AOUSD Working Groups drive formal specification development, while Interest Groups provide open forums that suggest new requirements and help shape future standards efforts.

Member Milestones and Momentum

AOUSD is highlighting significant momentum and milestones from its member community that demonstrate the growing impact of OpenUSD across physical AI and industrial digital twins. These advancements demonstrate a critical shift in how the industry handles heterogeneous and unstructured data. By leveraging OpenUSD as the high-fidelity bridge for SimReady digital twins, leaders in industrial automation are proving that the standard is the key to scaling complex virtual-to-physical workflows.

Autodesk introduced updates to Maya to further integrate OpenUSD into asset creation workflows. With its March updates, a new Component Creator enables users to convert selected objects into structured USD stages with a single action, reducing the technical overhead typically required for asset setup. This update also includes a Variant Manager which centralizes the management of variant sets in a single interface. Users can view, switch, and modify variants more directly, improving visibility and control over asset configurations within USD-based pipelines.

Foundry reinforced its commitment to the standard with three major product releases in Q1 2026, including Katana 9.0 and Nuke 17.0. These releases integrate OpenUSD’s advanced layering and camera schemas directly into creative pipelines, allowing artists to maintain a single source of truth across disparate tools and scale their workflows for increasingly complex cinematic productions.

Pickford.ai demonstrated the versatility of the standard with Whispers, an audience-powered interactive storytelling experience that debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. The project highlights OpenUSD’s ability to handle high-performance, real-time 3D content in creative environments, proving that the standard’s interoperability is as vital for new art forms as it is for industrial applications.

PTC showcased a new cloud-native workflow connecting Onshape CAD directly to NVIDIA Isaac Sim™ at GTC. By leveraging OpenUSD as the high-fidelity bridge between design and simulation, robotics teams can move from CAD to realistic environments in minutes without losing data integrity, enabling simulation-ready structures that update automatically as designs change.

NVIDIA announced the general availability of the NVIDIA Omniverse DSX blueprint, which leverages OpenUSD to construct physically accurate, "SimReady" digital twins of AI factories. By pre-configuring assets with the physical and material properties required for high-fidelity simulation, the blueprint allows organizations to virtually validate gigawatt-scale infrastructure, networks, and power layouts to maximize efficiency. NVIDIA is also collaborating with global industrial software leaders to accelerate high-fidelity digital twins enabled by OpenUSD data interoperability, bridging the gap between virtual planning and physical execution.

OpenUSD v26.03 introduced a native Particle Field schema for 3D Gaussian splats, defined through the AOUSD Emerging Geometry Interest Group as the UsdVolParticleField schema family, including UsdVolParticleField3DGaussianSplat. By allowing Gaussian splats to exist natively alongside traditional USD primitives in the same scene graph, this release brings photoreal volumetric reconstructions and lifelike 3D captures into standard layering, referencing, instancing, and override workflows, enabling smoother end‑to‑end pipelines from capture to simulation and deployment for Physical AI and digital twin applications.

Expansion of Industry Standards

With Core Specification 1.0 now ratified, the Alliance is shifting focus toward scalability and performance. The ongoing work in the Materials, Geometry, and Physics working groups, coupled with the new CMI Interest Group, forms the roadmap for Core Spec 1.1, specifically addressing the challenge of scaling heterogeneous data across industries. By fostering a culture of contribution and technical fluency, the Alliance is helping organizations move toward more efficient, scalable 3D workflows. This collective momentum reinforces OpenUSD as the foundational language for 3D worlds —a standard driven by and for the 3D ecosystem.

Supporting Quotes from New Members

Aras

“Open ecosystems scale innovation across customers, partners, and technology providers. Joining the Alliance for OpenUSD reflects Aras’ commitment to ensuring immersive digital twin environments and real-time simulation remain connected to the product and process truth managed across the lifecycle.”

Booz Allen

“Booz Allen is excited to join OpenUSD to advance the state and adoption of 3D workloads across the national security sectors of the Department of War, Intelligence and Civil agencies. The common translation layer that OpenUSD provides is critical to integrate models across Physical AI, 3D Reconstruction, Modeling and Simulation and Digital Engineering, and we are honored to be a supporting member. “

- Munjeet Singh, Senior Vice President, Booz Allen

C-Infinity

"We are excited to join the Alliance for OpenUSD. At C-Infinity, we are building AI that reasons about geometry, motion, and assembly constraints directly inside CAD and PLM environments—and OpenUSD is the open standard that makes that kind of cross-tool intelligence possible. We see tremendous opportunity to collaborate with Alliance members on bringing AI to manufacturing workflows, so that engineers can move from design to validated production plan faster than ever before. We look forward to contributing to interoperable manufacturing intelligence needed for physical AI."

Mobiltech

"Our vision at Mobiltech is to perfectly replicate the physical world into robust digital infrastructure, and joining AOUSD is a major milestone in realizing that goal. OpenUSD offers the remarkable scalability required to manage massive, city-scale 3D datasets. We look forward to collaborating with fellow alliance members to expand the boundaries of OpenUSD in smart city planning and digital twin construction, setting a new benchmark for spatial interoperability."

- Jason Kim, CEO, Mobiltech

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

"As a long‑standing provider of technologies used across the XR device ecosystem, Qualcomm Technologies welcomes the open standardization of OpenUSD as an important step toward advancing interoperability and innovation. By joining the Alliance for OpenUSD, Qualcomm Technologies looks forward to collaborating with industry partners and contributing its experience in enabling XR devices that support OpenUSD.”

*Qualcomm is a trademark or registered trademark of Qualcomm Incorporated.

SGDL Innovation

“SGDL Innovation is thrilled to join the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), bringing our pioneering expertise in non-anthropomorphic exolanguages for spatial reasoning, multidimensional data indexing and geolocation. Our technologies power diverse domains - from generative AI and synthetic cities to low-altitude economy, robotic teleoperation, digital twins, and we view OpenUSD as the ideal framework to enhance interoperability in 3D simulations and AI-driven workflows. Our objective in contributing to the Alliance is to promote and advance open standards for complex geospatial and robotic simulation and applications, fostering innovation across industries.”

XGRIDS

“OpenUSD provides a powerful and extensible foundation for interoperable 3D workflows across industries. As spatial data from real-world capture and technologies like 3D Gaussian Splatting rapidly scales, open standards become essential to organize, exchange, and collaborate on complex 3D scenes. At XGRIDS, we believe OpenUSD can serve as a universal backbone connecting capture, creation, simulation, and immersive experiences. We are excited to join the Alliance for OpenUSD and contribute to building a more open and interoperable future for spatial computing.”

- Kaiyong Zhao, CEO, XGRIDS

About the 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). By promoting greater interoperability of 3D tools and data, the Alliance enables 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.

Media contact:
pr@aousd.org