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It also announces new members and a collaboration with Khronos Group.
Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) has revealed its roadmap toward becoming a standard and announced new members and a collaboration with a well-known company.
AOUSD is an open organization established by Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA in August to "promote the standardization, development, evolution, and growth of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description technology" and "enable developers and content creators to more easily describe, compose, and simulate large-scale 3D projects."
Image credit: AOUSD
The organization has great plans for 2024 and 2025, which should result in "greater interoperability of 3D tools and data." AOUSD’s Core Specification (Core Spec) Working Group developed the roadmap with the goal of "formalizing the foundational data models and predictable behaviors of OpenUSD composition and population in normative specifications."
The group will define the foundation of OpenUSD to clarify how low-level data is structured and interpreted and ensure portability across software and devices so that users can use OpenUSD data in a "predictable, consistent manner."
“The AOUSD mission is to promote greater interoperability of 3D tools and data, enabling developers and content creators – including all of us at Pixar – to describe, compose, and simulate large-scale projects and build an ever-widening range of 3D-enabled products and services,” said Steve May, Chief Technology Officer at Pixar and Chairperson of AOUSD. “The new roadmap shared today shows the progress the alliance is making and unveils milestones and planned expansions over the next year to ensure interoperability and collaboration.”
AOUSD will provide a normative, multi-part data specification at the most low-level aspects of OpenUSD and then continue building in-depth specifications for all USD data models. The preliminary outlines for all specification areas should be delivered in the first quarter of 2024. In addition, the organization wants to work with the ISO JTC1 PAS submission process to allow international adoption and recognition of the core specification in the future. You can find the full roadmap with the details here.
AOUSD keeps growing: it has accepted 12 new general members, including Cesium, Chaos, Epic Games, Foundry, Hexagon, IKEA, Lowe’s, Meta, OTOY, SideFX, Spatial, and Unity. Such important companies will surely help it reach its goal and speed up the development of OpenUSD.
"Being a member of AOUSD allows us to participate in the creation of the specifications for USD and related projects, which is of huge importance to our customers," said Vladimir Koylazov, Co-Founder and Head of Innovation at Chaos. "Taking part in the alliance will also help us to continue improving our products, as we gain a forum to discuss in detail changes requested by both our own development teams and our customers. We are looking forward to exchanging ideas and discussing challenges with all the members of AOUSD."
Moreover, AOUSD collaborated with Khronos Group, an organization behind WebGL, glTF, and other open standards. Together, they will "maximize alignment and interoperability between OpenUSD for advanced 3D scene composition and authoring, and Khronos' glTF, a widely adopted 3D asset open standard for efficient delivery and loading of 3D scenes on diverse platforms, including the web." This should help coordinate the roadmaps of OpenUSD and glTF to avoid incompatibilities and better enable interoperation between the two technologies.
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