After years of being largely theorized with little tangible existence, the 3D ecosystem has been rapidly developing in recent years. There are still barriers to be crossed, particularly on the consumer side of things, but with innovations around scanning technology as well as rendering software – in part thanks to major game engines getting involved in enterprise tools. Still, with tools like NVIDIA’s Omniverse large facilities and other enterprise organizations are creating physically accurate digital representations of their projects for purposes like simulations and other workflows.
This technology is improving at a rapid pace, but one of the largest pieces missing that has been preventing this from becoming a true “ecosystem” is the ability for different pieces of a 3D scene creation pipeline – i.e. modeling, animating, rendering, lighting, etc. – have their own form of “scene description” that is tailored to their specific area. However, they often are not readable or editable within other applications. There was a clear need, in other words, for a way to interchange 3D scenes, which led to the Universal Scene Description (USD).
Originally created by Pixar, USD was released as open-source code in 2016 and has quickly become the standard interchange for these workflows, with some referring to it as the “HTML of the 3D ecosystem.” More recently, a group of some of the world’s biggest companies – including NVIDIA and Pixar, among others – formed the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) with the mission of promoting the interoperability of 3D content.
This is something we’ve covered extensively at Geo Week News, starting with that formation along with news about their roadmap and the addition of new members. What we have found in this coverage and in talking with people who work with geospatial data and in AEC plus operations workflows is that many are starting to hear about USD but might not know a whole lot about why it’s so important to this next step so many industries are going to take.
To that end, there is a great introduction to USD provided by AOUSD that you can find here, but we’ve also gathered a panel of experts from companies involved in the Alliance for OpenUSD to provide the crucial context professionals need to know as they gear up for a world where the interchange of 3D assets become the norm and USD is in the middle of it all. The speakers for this webinar are:
Marco Tillmann, Senior Product Manager, Omniverse, Digital Twin, NVIDIA
Kim Nyberg, Senior Technology Director, Trimble
Dave Braig, Senior Product Manager, Cesium
The webinar, which takes place on May 21 from 1:00pm-2:00pm Eastern Time, will include a brief presentation from Tillmann to give some further background on USD from a high level to be followed by a fascinating panel discussion with all three speakers. For free registration, which includes live access as well as a digital recording of the conversation, please follow the button below.
