Apple, Pixar, and Adobe collaborate to boost next-gen AR with alliance for OpenUSD

The alliance seeks to standardise the 3D ecosystem by advancing the capabilities of Open Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD).

San Francisco: Tech majors like Apple, Pixar, Adobe, Autodesk and NVIDIA, along with the Joint Development Foundation (JDF) which is an affiliate of the Linux Foundation, on Tuesday announced the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) to promote the standardisation, development, evolution, and growth of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description technology.

The alliance seeks to standardise the 3D ecosystem by advancing the capabilities of Open Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD).

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By promoting greater interoperability of 3D tools and data, the alliance will enable 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.

“OpenUSD will help accelerate the next generation of AR experiences, from artistic creation to content delivery, and produce an ever-widening array of spatial computing applications,” said Mike Rockwell, Apple’s vice president of the Vision Products Group.

“Apple has been an active contributor to the development of USD, and it is an essential technology for the groundbreaking visionOS platform, as well as the new Reality Composer Pro developer tool. We look forward to fostering its growth into a broadly adopted standard,” he added.

The alliance will 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 Organisation for Standardisation (ISO).

AOUSD will also provide the primary forum for the collaborative definition of enhancements to the technology by the greater industry.

“We open-sourced the project in 2016, and the influence of OpenUSD now expands beyond film, visual effects, and animation and into other industries that increasingly rely on 3D data for media interchange,” informed Steve May, Chief Technology Officer at Pixar and Chairperson of AOUSD.

Guido Quaroni, Senior Director of Engineering, 3D&I at Adobe said that leveraging a common 3D data representation during the creative process multiplies the value brought by each package and device.

“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,” Quaroni added.