Apple joins industry titans with Pixar to standardise 3D content ecosystem

Apple along with Adobe, NVIDIA, Autodesk have announced partnership with Linux Foundation, to standardise Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) technology.

With Vision Pro slated to launch in early 2024, Apple is actively involved in encouraging budding startups and established 3D app developers and platform owners players such as Unity offering tools, SDKs and hardware kits to test and refine their products to work seamlessly on the company's new spatial computer.

Now, the Cupertino-based company along with industry titans including Adobe, NVIDIA, Autodesk have announced partnership with Joint Development Foundation (JDF), an affiliate of the Linux Foundation, to standardise Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) technology so that all 3D development tools and content work on all platforms without any issues.

With the skewed distribution of different tools and platforms, 3D content which can play on one device may not work on others and this way, both the developers and consumers are at a loss. The former may be able to reach a wider audience and the latter may not be able to consume on their device due to hardware limitations.

With Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), Apple, NVIDIA, Adobe, Autodesk, Linux, and Pixar want to promote the standardisation, development, evolution, and growth of technology to standardize the 3D ecosystem.

“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. 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,” said Mike Rockwell, Apple’s vice president of the Vision Products Group.

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"By promoting greater interoperability of 3D tools and data, 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," reads the joint statement of AOUSD.

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AOUSD has chosen Linux Foundation's JDF to lead the project and come up with written specifications detailing the features of OpenUSD, and also seek recognition from International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

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"Universal Scene Description was invented at Pixar and is the technological foundation of our state-of-the-art animation pipeline. OpenUSD is based on years of research and application in Pixar filmmaking. We open-sourced the project in 2016, and the influence of OpenUSD now expands beyond film, visual effects, and animation and into other industries that increasingly rely on 3D data for media interchange. With the announcement of AOUSD, we signal the exciting next step: the continued evolution of OpenUSD as a technology and its position as an international standard," said Steve May, Chief Technology Officer at Pixar and Chairperson of AOUSD.

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It is said that OpenUSD is a high-performance 3D scene description technology. It can offer wider scope for companies to test their content with standardised tools, data, and workflows across multiple platforms. OpenUSD tech can help developers capture artistic expression and streamline cinematic content production.

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