Microsoft and Sony Back Universal Scene Description Standard

On August 1, 2024, Microsoft and Sony officially joined the Alliance for OpenUSD, lending significant institutional weight to the Universal Scene Description (USD) format. This development follows the alliance's formation last year by foundational members Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA.

Ben Lang of RoadToVR reports that the Alliance for OpenUSD's primary goal is to advance and proliferate USD as the future standard for creating and distributing 3D content. Lang highlights NVIDIA's descriptor of the standard as 'the HTML of the metaverse' and references Apple's earlier statement that it would 'help accelerate the next generation of AR experiences.'

Lang's report emphasizes that the core idea behind USD is to establish a single file format capable of containing geometry, lighting, animations, and other complex data. This consolidated format, they note, would enable portable use across various 3D authoring tools, including Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini, and Substance Painter, as well as facilitate collaborative workflows.

In a piece for RoadToVR, Ben Lang points out that Microsoft and Sony now join a roster of major players with strong ties to the extended reality (XR) industry, such as Meta and Epic Games. Lang also recalls Apple's initial perspective on USD when the alliance was first announced, quoting a Vice President of Apple's Vision Products Group who stated, '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.'

Our take: This convergence around OpenUSD is a critical accelerant for the spatial computing sector. A unified, robust 3D content standard is essential for interoperability and scaling immersive experiences beyond walled gardens. Microsoft's HoloLens ecosystem and Sony's PlayStation VR efforts, combined with their vast developer communities, will undoubtedly push adoption. We've been tracking the need for such a standard, and broad industry backing like this dramatically increases the likelihood of mainstream success for a truly open metaverse.