In a recent interview, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang resonated the same, saying: “OpenUSD is the HTML of virtual worlds. My expectation is every single design tool in the world will be able to connect to Open USD. And once you connect to that virtual world, you can collaborate with anybody, with any other tool anywhere.”
Universal scene description or USD was invented and open sourced by Pixar as a paradigm for interchange and assembly of 3D assets using a novel composition engine. It’s quickly been adopted into the production pipelines of many visual effects and animation studios.
And its rapid evolution and democratisation has accelerated spread into other industries outside of media and entertainment making it an HTML of metaverse.
OpenUSD is Everywhere
To understand the importance of OpenUSD one needs to watch Finding Dory. The 2016 Pixar film about a blue tang fish with anterograde amnesia was the first to be built using USD — which, many say, is a foundational building block of the metaverse.
Many compare its current iteration to HTML: Assets can be loaded and representation can be specified. Its next phase will be enhanced interactivity and portability — the CSS moment, so to speak.
The general consensus – “Let’s get to the JavaScript of USD,” said Natalya Tatarchuk, distinguished technical fellow and chief architect for professional artistry and graphics innovation at Unity Gaming Services.
However, strong application cases across sectors and remote workforces in the 3D world have been made possible by the integration of the framework with NVIDIA RTX and the recently unveiled Omniverse Cloud, which puts the entire platform to the cloud and makes it available across devices.
Designing, creating, and managing virtual worlds and digital twins, Omniverse links teams globally, making it an effective organisational collaboration tool. Engineers, designers, and producers of video games have embraced it. It is also used in robotics and manufacturing.
“USD is the closest thing to a universal 3D standard there is today,” said Guy Martin, director of open source and standards at NVIDIA. Martin wants USD in industries like manufacturing, construction, architecture and engineering.
To achieve that, last year Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk and NVIDIA launched the Alliance for OpenUSD to build true open standards for USD in many areas, including core specification, materials, geometry and more.
In January 2024, Siemens and Intel announced that they have joined the Alliance, and are partnering with NVIDIA to help create the next generation of persistent, intelligent, real-time AI-powered 3D universes.
The USD Spec is Already Big
One of the advantages of HTML when it first came out was its simplicity. Users couldn’t do too much, so it wasn’t hard to create something that looked similar to Netscape’s or Sun’s website.
Similarly, Pixar has released a number of tools to help get beginners up to speed — USDview is a helpful way to inspect USD source to see how it does what it does
But just as HTML evolved from the limited static documents of HTML 1 to the dynamic applications of HTML 5, it is clear that USD will need to evolve to meet the needs of the metaverse. To accelerate this evolution, NVIDIA has already made a number of additions to the USD ecosystem.
USD now occupies the same space as HTML did in the early 1990s. The difficult task of assisting in closing the gaps and enhancing tools across multiple leaders has been taken on by NVIDIA.
NVIDIA is also using open USD to georeference real world geometry using geospatial coordinates. This can be used for railroad design or city mapping, or even to georeference real world geometry using geospatial coordinates. NVIDIA is also working on building USD connections to IoT data streaming protocols.
Promising examples of what could be achievable with better digital twin interoperability are being provided by early adopters. Companies like Siemens, Amazon Robotics, and BMW Group are leveraging USD to bring their virtual factories to life, finding new levels of operational efficiency for large-scale workloads.
