Apple just announced it is working with Adobe, Autodesk, NVIDIA, Pixar and Joint Development Foundation (an affiliate of the Linux Foundation) to promote the standardisation, development, evolution and growth of Pixar's Universal Scene Description (USD) technology.
OpenUSD is a high-performance 3D scene description technology that offers robust interoperability across tools, data, and workflows. It is touted as the ideal content platform for embracing the needs of new industries and applications.
The issue now with 3D content creation is that specific software is often required to read or edit files. OpenUSD aims to solve this by providing "a common language for defining, packaging, assembling, and editing 3D data interchangeably at scale."
The Alliance for OpenUSD will aim to boost greater interoperability of 3D tools and data so that developers and content creators can describe, compose and simulate large-scale 3D projects and build a wider range of 3D-enabled products and services.
In addition, the alliance will develop written specifications detailing the features of USD to enable greater compatibility and wider adoption, integration, and implementation, and allows inclusion by other standards bodies into their specifications.
Mike Rockwell, Apple's VP of the Vision Products Group, believes 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."
More importantly, at least for Apple, OpenUSD is an essential technology for the visionOS platform and the Reality Composer Pro developer tool. With Apple's Vision Pro launching early next year, the Alliance for OpenUSD is likely to lay the groundwork for new 3D content coming to the spatial computing device.
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