Inching closer to the network of digital spaces and riding high on AI, NVIDIA has announced a broad initiative to evolve Universal Scene Description (USD) to become the foundation of open metaverse and 3D internet.
At its SIGGRAPH special address, the firm spelt out its plans to develop an open USD Compatibility Testing and Certification Suite for developers, thus accelerating USD development and adoption.
“USD will give 3D artists, designers, developers and others the ability to work collaboratively across diverse workflows and applications as they build virtual worlds,” said Rev Lebaredian, vice-president of Omniverse and simulation technology, NVIDIA.
The company will be working with USD’s inventor, Pixar as well as Adobe, Autodesk, Siemens and other leading companies, which will help it chalk out a multi-year roadmap to expand USD’s capabilities beyond visual effects. This will, in turn, empower industrial metaverse applications used in architecture, engineering, manufacturing, scientific computing, robotics and industrial digital twins.
“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,” Rev said.
On its strategy to evolve USD, the company stated that international character support will allow those who speak different languages to participate in USD. Support for geospatial coordinates will enable city-scale and planetary-scale digital twins. Also, real-time streaming of IoT data will enable the development of digital twins.
NVIDIA mulls roping in hundreds of engineering and product leads across the USD ecosystem to work on USD development priorities.
NVIDIA also announced investing in building USD plugins from popular 3D software ecosystems to NVIDIA Omniverse™, a platform for connecting and creating virtual worlds based on Universal Scene Description.
“Siemens and NVIDIA are coming together to enable the industrial metaverse where the future of design, engineering and collaboration will occur,” said Dirk Didascalou, chief technology officer of Siemens Digital Industries. “We are excited to support USD in the Siemens Xcelerator platform and plan to collaborate with NVIDIA on the next generation of the format.”
Metaverse has already established its presence in media, gaming, robotics, industrial automation, retail and grocery, with innovators adopting USD as their metaverse language of choice, including Kroger and Volvo Cars.
“The promise of USD is immense. At Volvo, we immediately understood the value of the open, extensible, interoperable 3D scene description for our metaverse projects. Being able to maintain assets as a single source of truth and bring them from virtual world to virtual world will be seamless in 3D internet consumer applications,” said Mattias Wikenmalm, senior expert of visualization at Volvo Cars.
To make people understand the USD concept and how it exchanges 3D computer graphics, NVIDIA is providing hundreds of on-demand tutorials, documentation and developer tools.
“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,” said Steve May, chief technology officer at Pixar Animation Studios.
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