Open USD
The OpenUSD Alliance has introduced Open USD, an open-source framework for 3D scene description and interchange, designed to enable collaboration across visual effects, animation, and industrial visualization pipelines by standardizing the exchange of complex 3D data.
Background
Open USD (Universal Scene Description) is an open-source framework from Pixar for composing complex 3D scenes from many files. Think of it like Git for 3D — it lets artists layer geometry, lighting, and animation from different sources into one scene without overwriting each other. It's now governed by the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), backed by Pixar, Apple, NVIDIA, and Adobe. The "Open USD" specification (note the space) standardizes the format across vendors, distinct from Pixar's own implementation. This matters for film pipelines, Apple's Vision Pro spatial computing, AI training data for 3D, and industrial digital twins.