With the Apple Vision Pro expected to launch in early 2024, Apple has formed an interesting alliance with Pixar, Adobe, Autodesk, NVIDIA, and the Joint Development Foundation to create standards for 3D content. The Alliance for Open Universal Scene Description will promote Pixar’s USD technology’s standardization, development, evolution, and growth.
The alliance seeks to standardize the 3D ecosystem by advancing the capabilities of Open Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD). By promoting greater 3D tools and data interoperability, 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.
Created by Pixar Animation Studios, OpenUSD is a high-performance 3D scene description technology that offers robust interoperability across tools, data, and workflows. Already known for its ability to capture artistic expression and streamline cinematic content production collaboratively, OpenUSD’s power and flexibility make it an ideal content platform to embrace the needs of new industries and applications.
The alliance will develop written specifications detailing the features of OpenUSD. This will enable greater compatibility and broader 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 Organization for Standardization (ISO).
AOUSD will also provide the primary forum for the collaborative definition of enhancements to the technology by the greater industry. The alliance invites a broad range of companies and organizations to join and participate in shaping the future of OpenUSD.
“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.”
This alliance will benefit Apple as it just entered the spatial computer market. This new standard will help develop and display the right 3D content on the company’s platform, including giving developers and content creators the right tools to show their productions in an AR/VR platform.
As the Apple Vision Pro release nears, we’ll learn more about how this alliance will impact content availability on the new platform.
