Five major companies in the 3D content industry — Apple, Adobe, Autodesk, Nvidia and Pixar — have joined hands to form Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), which is about the interoperability of 3D content.
The geeky name points to Open Universal Scene Description developed by Pixar Animation Studios and it will allow 3D content to be more easily created using a range of tools.
Universal Scene Description was invented at Pixar. “OpenUSD is based on years of research and application in Pixar film-making. 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. With the announcement of AOUSD, we signal the exciting next step: the continued evolution of OpenUSD as a technology and its position as an international standard,” said Steve May, chief technology officer at Pixar and chairperson of AOUSD.
Apple’s interest in 3D content has a lot to do with its Vision Pro headset, which will put forward applications and movies in 3D. Slated for release in 2024, the $3,499 headset is Apple’s first spatial computing device.
“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. 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,” said Mike Rockwell, Apple’s vice-president of the Vision Products Group.
Universal Scene Description or USD is a 3D file format that offers a chance to unify user experiences and developer workflows. In a deep dive, VentureBeat points out that it could be a standard just like HTML enabled the Web. Richard Kerris, vice-president of the Omniverse platform at Nvidia, said at a MetaBeat event: “We think of USD as the HTML of 3D. The connective tissue that we experience the web through today is HTML. That’s what makes it seamless from website to website, device to device. It wasn’t always that way. But those of us that are old enough to remember [things like] what extension do you have loaded? What browser? Once that got remedied with HTML, everything’s been smooth sailing. USD is going to do that for 3D so that we can go from virtual world to virtual world seamlessly.”
Pixar developed USD to use the 3D assets that it was creating for its animated movies. Working on films like Toy Story and A Bug’s Life, Pixar thought there could be something more than having to reinvent technologies for each generation of movies. A new animation system called Presto was used in the film Brave. Presto evolved into TidScene and eventually Pixar began its USD project. In 2016, Pixar published USD as open-source software.
OpenUSD is being embraced by industries beyond the film industry, including architecture, engineering, construction, automotive, and manufacturing.
Apple becoming a partner means one can expect top-of-the-line 3D content to arrive on the company’s spatial computing platform.