Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD (apple.com)

Article summary

Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA have formed the Alliance for OpenUSD to promote the standardization and development of Pixar's Universal Scene Description technology. The alliance aims to standardize the 3D ecosystem by advancing the capabilities of Open Universal Scene Description, enabling greater interoperability of 3D tools and data. This will allow developers and content creators to describe, compose, and simulate large-scale 3D projects and build a range of 3D-enabled products and services. The alliance will develop written specifications for OpenUSD and provide a forum for collaborative definition of enhancements to the technology.

Main themes

• 3D standards and formats
• OpenUSD and Universal Scene Description
• corporate alliances and collaborations
• float parsing and round-tripping
• 3D streaming and performance
• standardization and interoperability

What commenters say

• The formation of corporate alliances for standards and formats often raises questions about the administrative and organizational aspects of these collaborations.
• The use of plain text encoding for floats in OpenUSD files is human-readable but may not be ideal for all use cases, such as debugging or round-tripping.
• Some commenters argue that the culture and practices of the C programming language community may contribute to issues with round-tripping and float parsing.
• The effectiveness of 3D streaming services is debated, with some commenters citing issues with latency and performance, while others argue that these services can be suitable for certain applications and audiences.