Chaos, Epic Games, Foundry, Otoy, SideFX join Alliance for OpenUSD
Orignally posted on 13 December 2023 and updated with details of new AOUSD members.
Chaos, Epic Games, Foundry, Otoy, SideFX and Unity have all joined the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), the cross-industry organization founded to guide future development of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description technology.
The AOUSD has also published its first two-year roadmap for OpenUSD, and entered an alliance with The Khronos Group to ensure interoperability between OpenUSD and glTF.
12 new AOUSD members, from across a range of industries
Formed earlier this year, the AOUSD aims to make OpenUSD an ISO ratified standard, and to expand it from an entertainment-industry technology to “embrace the needs of new industries”.
As well as Pixar itself, the founder members were Adobe, Apple, Autodesk and NVIDIA, with Cesium, Epic Games, Foundry, SideFX and Unity all announced as future general members.
All five have now officially joined the AOUSD, as have renderer developers Chaos and Otoy, CAD modeling technology firm Spatial, retailers IKEA and Lowe’s and tech giants Hexagon and Meta.
Updated 11 March 2024: A further eight companies have now joined as general members, including Intel, Cinema 4D developer Maxon and SketchUp developer Trimble.
New two-year roadmap and cooperation agreement with The Khronos Group
The AOUSD has now published its first two-year roadmap, which is early-stages stuff, focusing on defining a formal specification for the OpenUSD core.
The Alliance has also announced a “liaison relationship” with standards body The Khronos Group over glTF, the 3D data format for web and real-time apps that Khronos oversees.
It’s partly just an agreement not to tread on one another’s toes, by coordinating the roadmaps of the two standards to “avoid needless incompatibilities”.
However, it fits with the AOUSD’s goal of broadening OpenUSD out to new markets, with the two organizations aiming to create pipelines for generating “sophisticated 3D content that can be pervasively experienced on a wide range of platforms”.
Updated 11 March 2024: The AOUSD has now entered a second liaison relationship with the Academy Software Fondation to foster work across USD and the ASWF-maintained MaterialX.
Read more about the new Alliance for Open USD members on the organisation’s website
Read more about cooperation between the AOUSD and The Khronos Group