Alliance for OpenUSD Announces New Members, Interest Groups, and Working Group Progress
SAN FRANCISCO, March 17, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — The Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) today announced five new general members, the formation of two new Interest Groups, and significant progress across multiple Working Groups and Interest Groups as OpenUSD adoption continues to expand across industries.
Formed in 2023, AOUSD is an organization dedicated to fostering the standardization, development, evolution, and growth of OpenUSD, an extensible framework for describing, composing, simulating, and collaboratively navigating and constructing 3D scenes.
New Members
AOUSD is proud to welcome five new general members — Amazon, Delta Electronics, Homestyler, Kondux, and Rockwell Automation. The diverse expertise of these companies across digital design, industrial automation, smart manufacturing, and cloud computing will further strengthen the OpenUSD ecosystem. Learn more about becoming a member of AOUSD today.
New Interest Groups Drive Industry-Specific Innovation
AOUSD announced the formation of two new Interest Groups focused on expanding OpenUSD applications across emerging sectors:
Industrial and Engineering Digital Twin (IEDT) Interest Group
This Interest Group will examine the opportunity for OpenUSD in digital twins for industrial and engineering applications. The group will develop recommendations around digital twin definitions, terminology, and requirements to drive USD adoption in this ecosystem.
Web Interest Group
The Web Interest Group will explore options for consuming, distributing, and interacting with OpenUSD content on the Internet across the web stack. The group will make recommendations to enable OpenUSD to be effectively displayed and experienced on the Web, including use cases for WebAssembly builds and optimization for web deployment.
“These new Interest Groups represent key strategic domains for the expansion of OpenUSD,” said Guy Martin, AOUSD Vice Chairperson & Director of Open Source & Standards, NVIDIA. “By addressing the specific challenges of industrial digital twins and web technologies, we’re ensuring that OpenUSD can meet the growing demands of these critical sectors while maintaining the interoperability that is central to our mission. Each group brings together diverse participants with specialized expertise to develop recommendations that will guide our Working Groups in expanding OpenUSD’s capabilities.”
AOUSD Working Groups Progress
Core Spec Working Group
The Core Spec Working Group is wrapping up its preliminary draft submission for Core Spec 1.0, focused on normatively specifying the algorithm for value resolution, which ensures that composed stages return predictable results for all queries over their contents. The WG is also working on a sample implementation of value resolution that complements the normative specification.
Along with preparing its preliminary draft submission of the specification, the WG is finishing work on a first release of its sample implementations for parsing the human-readable USDA and binary USDC file formats. These can also be used for compliance testing and will be available as source code.
Materials Working Group
The Materials Working Group is focused on authoring normative language for material node definitions, which will be proposed as updates to the MaterialX Specification through AOUSD’s partnership with the Academy Software Foundation. The team has made substantial progress toward a first draft for review, with each working group member contributing to specific material node categories, including math, procedurals, and BSDFs.
Key upcoming milestones include the submission of a normative language pull request to the MaterialX Specification for review by the MaterialX Technical Steering Committee, and the authoring of the USD MaterialX Interchange Specification, which will reference the normative material node definitions in the MaterialX Specification while extending it with a description of the UsdShade schema and type mappings between USD and MaterialX.
AOUSD Interest Groups Updates
Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operations (AECO) Interest Group
The AECO Interest Group is currently focused on developing a comprehensive naming (Prim name grammar) proposal for the Technical Advisory Committee, with expected completion in the coming months. This initiative involves extensive research, collaboration, and consensus-building to ensure robust and clear naming conventions.
Looking ahead, the team plans to work on a geolocation proposal for the Geometry Working Group during April-May, which will establish clear guidelines and standards for geospatial coordinate systems in OpenUSD.
Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) Interest GroupThe DEI Interest Group has finalized its mission statement and begun collaborations with the Academy Software Foundation’s D&I team on a shared Inclusive Language Guide. The group is also brainstorming projects for the upcoming months and years to help expand AOUSD’s reach and inspire content creators from diverse backgrounds.
New Release of OpenUSD
OpenUSD v25.02 is now available, bringing significant enhancements to the platform. This release expands OpenUSD’s alignment into content interoperability domains through MaterialX/OpenPBR support and a new Color Space API. Key improvements include optimizations to sublayer change processing, an enhanced validation framework with all usdchecker rules ported to the new C++-based system, semantic label display in usdview, and support for scalar translate and scale XformOps so that translates, rotates, and scales can all be driven by splines.
Developers should note that the default file version for newly-created binary (USDC) files has been updated to 0.10.0, which requires OpenUSD v23.11 or newer. This release continues to strengthen OpenUSD’s capabilities for creating interoperable 3D content across industries.
