A Season of Progress
The final stretch of 2025 is shaping up to be an active period for the AOUSD community, with notable developments spanning the last few months and exciting initiatives ahead. From AI-powered storytelling debuting at international film festivals to ongoing NASA digital twin projects, our members continue to expand OpenUSD’s reach across different industries. Here’s what AOUSD members have been up to as we head into the final quarter of 2025.
Pickford AI
Interactive AI Storytelling Takes Center Stage
September | Busan International Film Festival (Korea)
Pickford AI brought interactive AI storytelling to the Busan International Film Festival with the premiere of “Whispers,” an interactive thriller that lets viewers communicate directly with the detective character to influence a murder mystery investigation.
The project also secured SAG approval for AI voices, featuring a cast including Stephen Chang (“The Last of Us”), Tohoru Masamune (“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”), and Brandon Soohoo (“Tropic Thunder”). The series was created in partnership with Emmy winner Bernie Su (“The Lizzie Bennet Diaries”), who noted that “this experience is a story experience that cannot be done without AI. It’s a new art form that, at its speed and at its fidelity, cannot be done without AI and the technology that Pickford pioneered.”
AOUSD takeaway: Interactive storytelling is expanding beyond traditional formats, with OpenUSD-enabled technologies supporting new forms of audience participation.
Pixar
Advancing Open Source Innovation
November | OpenUSD 25.11 Release
The OpenUSD ecosystem continues its rapid advancement, with v25.11 introducing significant updates that enhance UI, rendering, physics, and performance. This release marks a major step forward in standardizing user interactions, improving rendering fidelity, and providing a more robust and efficient framework for interoperable 3D content. Check out this blog for more details on the latest developments!
Celebrating Creativity Through Competition
Aug 13 – Nov 11, 2025 | RenderMan “First Contact” Art Challenge
Pixar launched their 12th RenderMan Art Challenge with the “First Contact” theme, celebrating both the interstellar magic of Pixar’s film “Elio” and the 30th anniversary of “Toy Story.” The challenge invited artists worldwide to create alien-themed artwork using physically plausible shading and lighting.
Supported by industry partners including AMD, Dell, NVIDIA, Ranch Computing, Adobe, and others, the challenge offered tens of thousands of dollars in prizes. The competition emphasized both photorealistic and stylized approaches within the RenderMan shading toolset, encouraging artists to push creative boundaries while maintaining technical excellence.
AOUSD takeaway: Regular open source releases keep driving innovation forward, while community challenges help demonstrate the creative possibilities of professional-grade tools.
DigitalFish
DigitalFish Advances NASA XR Twins
Aug 2024 – Sept 9, 2025 | NASA STTR Phase I
DigitalFish recently completed a NASA Phase I STTR, USDI-XRED: OpenUSD + Interactivity for XR Experience Description. The work showed how OpenUSD can be extended to support multi-device immersive digital twins for mission rehearsal, training, and operations support.
Working with researchers from Cornell University’s DAIL lab, the team designed and prototyped USD extensions within Unreal Engine to build RoleQuorum VR, a hybrid desktop-VR simulator where 68 participants drove NASA’s VIPER rover across lunar terrain. Cornell’s user study demonstrated that structured XR collaboration can improve decision speed and accuracy in rover operations.
With Phase I feasibility established, DigitalFish has now submitted its Phase II proposal, aimed at delivering a prototype system: new OpenUSD schemas for XR and interactivity, validators for device portability, and an assembly tool for rapidly integrating diverse sources across NASA science, engineering, and operations datasets.
DigitalFish’s CEO and PI on the project, Dan Herman, also serves as Chair of AOUSD’s Industrial & Engineering Digital Twins Interest Group, ensuring that lessons learned from this NASA work feed directly into AOUSD’s standards process.
AOUSD takeaway: OpenUSD is powering immersive digital twins that will lift NASA missions to the Moon and beyond.
NVIDIA
Expanding Professional Development in OpenUSD
August | NCP-OpenUSD Development Certification
NVIDIA launched their NCP-OpenUSD Development certification program, an intermediate-level credential that validates professionals’ ability to build, maintain, and optimize 3D content creation pipelines using OpenUSD. The certification addresses growing industry demand for skilled OpenUSD practitioners through a 90-minute online exam with 70 questions.
Accelerating Open Robot Learning with Newton
September | Linux Foundation Contribution: Newton
The Linux Foundation announced Newton, an open-source, GPU-accelerated, extensible physics engine co-developed by Disney Research, Google DeepMind, and NVIDIA. Built on NVIDIA Warp and OpenUSD, Newton supports multiple physics solvers and tackles contact-rich behaviors—enabling robots to learn skills in simulation and transfer them to the real world. Under LF’s neutral governance, the project welcomes broad academic and industry participation.
AOUSD takeaway: By anchoring simulation on open standards—including OpenUSD—Newton lowers the barrier to sim-to-real research and speeds progress toward generalist robotics.
Omniverse DSX Blueprint for Gigawatt-Scale AI Factories
October | Omniverse DSX Blueprint
NVIDIA introduced the Omniverse DSX Blueprint, an open, end-to-end playbook for designing and operating AI factories, powered by SimReady OpenUSD assets. DSX unites building design, power and cooling, and NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure into a single digital-twin workflow, validated with partners across the ecosystem (design/construct, power/cooling, and grid interaction). From co-design and prefabricated modules to agent-driven optimization in operations, DSX turns AI factories into continuously learnable systems.
AOUSD takeaway: DSX shows how OpenUSD can carry a complex facility from concept to live operations in one interoperable thread.
Trimble
Building Industry Connections
November | Trimble Dimensions 2025
Trimble continues to strengthen the connection between OpenUSD and the architecture, engineering, and construction industries through Trimble Dimensions 2025. AOUSD leaders and partners took the Spotlight stage to share how OpenUSD is advancing 3D collaboration for engineering and construction. This ongoing engagement demonstrates how OpenUSD standards are becoming increasingly relevant to infrastructure and built environment applications, expanding the ecosystem beyond traditional entertainment and media use cases.
To go deeper, read our new Meet the Visionary profile on Sean Snyders, from Hollywood VFX (Avatar, The Hobbit) to construction automation, linking SketchUp, Trimble Connect, and 3D Warehouse into OpenUSD-enabled pipelines.
AOUSD takeaway: OpenUSD’s expansion into construction and infrastructure shows how open standards can work across diverse industries that need precise 3D data interchange.
Spatial
Analogue 26 + Analogue Portal 26
October | Apple Vision Pro & iPhone
Spatial launched Analogue 26 for Apple Vision Pro, with Logitech Muse support for precise, real-time annotation, and Analogue Portal 26 for iPhone to bring clients and stakeholders directly into 3D reviews. The suite connects immersive design on headset with team-wide feedback on mobile, streamlining sketch, markup, and discussion around live USD scenes. Backend workflows remain optimized for OpenUSD, aligning with Spatial’s earlier announcements.
AOUSD takeaway: By pairing headset-grade creation with phone-first participation—and standardizing on OpenUSD—Spatial is closing the loop between design and decision-making.
Growing Applications Across Industries
These recent developments and upcoming initiatives show the range of activity within the AOUSD ecosystem as we move through the final months of 2025. From interactive entertainment debuting at international film festivals to NASA missions preparing for lunar exploration, from professional certification programs launching this summer to art challenges currently underway, our members continue to find new applications for OpenUSD across different industries.
These projects show OpenUSD’s usefulness across different applications and industries. Whether supporting AI-driven storytelling, enabling space mission training, or helping with construction projects, the common element is how open, interoperable standards enable work that would be harder to accomplish with closed systems.
The collaborative approach behind these projects continues to strengthen the ecosystem. Each development creates new possibilities for other members to build upon, supporting the cycle of innovation and collaboration that characterizes the AOUSD community.
As we finish out 2025 and look ahead to 2026, these recent and upcoming developments provide a solid foundation for continued progress. The diverse expertise and technical work our members contribute to the community helps ensure that OpenUSD will continue to expand its practical applications across a growing range of industries.
AOUSD Summit 2025
Nov 2025 | Autodesk Gallery, San Francisco (hybrid)
Huge thank-you to every member who joined us in person and online to collaborate, share ideas, and help chart the next era of OpenUSD. This year’s Summit focused on aligning OpenUSD implementation and AOUSD standardization roadmaps with a commitment to transparent, community-driven development. We saw strong consensus around content standards and compliance infrastructure, and the AOUSD Core Spec is now nearing approval—with compliance testing and documentation tools in the pipeline. Liaison work also opened doors for new plugins, cloud-optimized formats, and domain-specific extensions hosted by AOUSD.
Thank you to everyone who joined, presented, and debated. Your collaboration is shaping the next era of OpenUSD.
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