Before the start of SIGGRAPH 2024 this year, the OpenUSD Alliance (AOUSD) announced that DigitalFish, Hunan Mango Innovation Technology, Microsoft, Sony Group, Shutterstock, and Sanweijia Information Technology had joined as new members. It also announced the establishment of a new interest group (Interest Group), launched a new version of OpenUSD, and prepared to promote the core specification definition.
This update further simplifies the adoption and implementation process of OpenUSD, making the OpenUSD extensible framework easier to use for describing, combining, simulating, collaboratively navigating, and constructing 3D scenes.
The newly announced interest groups will help industry experts generate new ideas to advance OpenUSD across various industries and applications. Each interest group operates under a specific charter that outlines its scope and goals and provides input to the official OpenUSD Alliance working group that drives standards.
The first wave of interest groups will study the application possibilities of the USD framework in the fields of architecture, engineering, construction and operations, as well as diversity, equity and inclusion, and emerging fields such as geometry, and provide relevant suggestions.
The Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operations interest group will be chaired by Angel Velez, senior manager at Autodesk, and Sean Snyders, research manager at Trimble. The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion interest group will be chaired by Lori Smallwood, manager at Apple. The Emerging Geometry interest group will be chaired by Dr. Raymond Fei, senior research engineer at Adobe, and Gavriel State, senior director of system software at NVIDIA.
The concurrent release of OpenUSD v24.08 will bring increased flexibility and usability, including communication agreements between the OpenUSD Alliance, ASWF, and Khronos, and a new version of the OpenUSD Validation Framework, allowing content owners to easily identify and resolve OpenUSD scenario issues.
During SIGGRAPH 2024, the OpenUSD Alliance will also use this exhibition event to expand the application scope of its framework, thereby faster establishing universal 3D imaging content and widely applying it in different fields.
