Last year, Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA announced the Alliance for OpenUSD, an organization to advance and proliferate the USD file format as the future standard for creating and distributing 3D content. The standard, which is a framework for constructing and packaging complex 3D scenes, was called the “HTML of the metaverse” by NVIDIA, and expected to “help accelerate the next generation of AR experiences,” by Apple.
Now two more heavyweights, Microsoft and Sony, have joined the Alliance for OpenUSD in support of Universal Scene Description (USD) as the future of authoring and packaging complex 3D content. The idea is to have a single file format that contains geometry, lighting, animations and more—which can be portably used between 3D authoring tools like Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini, Substance Painter, and collaborative workflows.
In addition to Apple, Microsoft and Sony join other members of the group with significant ties to the XR industry, like Meta and Epic Games.
For Apple’s part, the company sees USD as an important building stone for the XR space.
“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 Apple’s VP of the Vision Products Group at the time the Alliance for OpenUSD was announced. “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.”