NVIDIA announced a broad initiative to evolve Universal Scene Description (USD) to become the foundation of the open metaverse and 3D internet. NVIDIA revealed the initiative during its SIGGRAPH special address when it shared upcoming updates to evolve USD.
NVIDIA announced a broad initiative to evolve Universal Scene Description (USD) to become the foundation of the open metaverse and 3D internet. NVIDIA revealed the initiative during its SIGGRAPH special address when it shared upcoming updates to evolve USD.
NVIDIA will be working with USD’s inventor, Pixar, as well as Adobe, Autodesk, Siemens, and others, to pursue a multi-year roadmap expanding USD’s capabilities beyond visual effects and to better support industrial metaverse applications in architecture, engineering, manufacturing, scientific computing, robotics, and industrial digital twins.
Updates include international character support to allow users from all countries and languages to participate in USD, geospatial coordinates to enable city-scale and planetary-scale digital twins, and real-time streaming of IoT data. The updates will allow the development of digital twins that are synchronized to the physical world.
To accelerate USD development and adoption, NVIDIA also announced the development of an open USD Compatibility Testing and Certification Suite to let developers freely use to test their USD builds and certify the expected results.
Rev Lebaredian, NVIDIA’s vice president of Omniverse and simulation technology, explained:
“Beyond media and entertainment, USD will give 3D artists, designers, developers, and others the ability to work collaboratively across diverse workflows and applications as they build virtual worlds. Working with our community of partners, we’re investing in USD so that it can serve as the foundation for architecture, manufacturing, robotics, engineering, and many more domains.”
Open Source USD Resources
NVIDIA is releasing a collection of free resources to speed USD adoption that includes thousands of USD assets purpose-built to open up building the virtual world for users who lack 3D expertise. The resources include simulation-ready USD assets designed for use in industrial digital twins and AI training workflows. The company also provides hundreds of on-demand tutorials, documentation, instructor-led courses, and developer tools to help spread USD education.
Pixar’s chief technology officer, Steve May, added:
“USD is a cornerstone of Pixar’s pipeline, and it’s seeing rapidly growing momentum as an open-source framework across not only VFX and animation, but now industrial, design, and scientific applications. NVIDIA’s contributions to help evolve USD as the open foundation of fully interoperable 3D platforms will be a great benefit across industries.”
NVIDIA Omniverse Plugins
NVIDIA is investing in building USD plugins from popular 3D software ecosystems to NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform for connecting and creating virtual worlds based on USD. New beta releases include PTC Creo and SideFX Houdini, with Autodesk Alias and Autodesk Civil3D, Siemens Xcelerator, and more in development.
NVIDIA is taking advantage of SIGGRAPH to bring together hundreds of engineering and product leads across the USD ecosystem creating working councils to align on USD development priorities and gather feedback on where NVIDIA can centralize development efforts.
Media, gaming, robotics, industrial automation, retail, and grocery innovators are adopting USD as their metaverse language of choice, including Kroger and Volvo Cars.
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