By Steve May, CTO of Pixar Animation Studios and chairperson of the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD)
In 2025, the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) achieved a defining milestone: the ratification of Core Specification 1.0—the universal language for building 3D worlds. This landmark accomplishment, combined with rapid membership growth, expanded working group achievements, and deepened industry collaboration, marks 2025 as a transformative year for OpenUSD as the open standard for 3D content creation and interoperability.
From standardization breakthroughs to strategic partnerships, we have strengthened the foundation for OpenUSD to serve as a unifying framework across industries from media and entertainment to manufacturing, architecture, robotics, and beyond.
Progress in Governance
AOUSD launched three new Interest Groups in 2025, expanding our capacity to address emerging industry needs:
Industrial and Engineering Digital Twin (IEDT) Interest Group
The Interest Group examines the opportunity for OpenUSD in digital twins for industrial and engineering applications. The group has developed recommendations around digital twin definitions, terminology, and requirements to drive OpenUSD adoption across manufacturing, data centers, industrial inspection, and operations.
Web Interest Group
The Web Interest Group explores options for consuming, distributing, and interacting with OpenUSD content on the Internet across the web stack. The group is developing recommendations to enable OpenUSD to be effectively displayed and experienced on the Web, including use cases for WebAssembly builds and optimization for web deployment.
Build Interest Group
The Build Interest Group was established to improve the developer experience and reduce friction across OpenUSD’s build systems and tooling. This group focuses on build processes, packaging, CI/CD, onboarding, and integration workflows to lower the barrier to entry for the community.
Organization Growth
AOUSD’s membership expanded significantly in 2025, reflecting the growing recognition of OpenUSD’s influence across diverse sectors. We welcomed 13 new general members throughout the year:
March 2025: Amazon, Delta Electronics, Homestyler, Kondux, and Rockwell Automation joined, bringing expertise in digital design, industrial automation, smart manufacturing, and cloud computing.
August 2025: Accenture, Esri, HCLTech, Intrinsic, PTC, Renault, Tech Soft 3D, and The Coca-Cola Company joined, spanning industrial software, automotive innovation, global consumer brands, GIS, enterprise services, and immersive technologies.
By year’s end, AOUSD has grown to 50 General Members and 88 Contributor Members, underscoring the breadth of industries now invested in OpenUSD’s future.
Global Events and Community Engagement
OpenUSD Ecosystem Growth
2025 saw a remarkable expansion of the OpenUSD ecosystem, with industry leaders showcasing how they are adopting and evolving OpenUSD across major conferences and events.
NVIDIA GTC (March 17–21, San Jose)
GTC 2025 featured an extensive catalog of OpenUSD sessions and trainings, with AOUSD members presenting throughout the week. Highlights included sessions on photorealistic digital twins from Siemens, Apple’s spatial computing development with Vision Pro, factory-scale digital twin simulation from Rockwell Automation, and Foxconn’s GB200 production line digital twin project. Members, including Ansys, Apple, Bright Machines, Cadence, Delta Electronics, Foxconn, Homestyler, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Rockwell Automation, Siemens, Trimble, and Worley, exhibited and presented sessions spanning physical AI, robotics, manufacturing, and data center simulation.
SIGGRAPH 2025 (August 10–14, Vancouver)
SIGGRAPH continued our strong presence with comprehensive OpenUSD programming. Highlights included the joint AOUSD and Academy Software Foundation USD Working Group Birds of a Feather session, Pixar USD Open Source Birds of a Feather session, a dedicated OpenUSD Day featuring sessions on physical AI, robotics, and digital twins, and a Town Hall workshop on Gaussian Splats standardization. The “State of 3D Asset Interoperability using USD and glTF” Birds of a Feather brought together Autodesk, Bentley Systems, Khronos Group, NVIDIA, and Pixar to discuss cross-format collaboration. NVIDIA also introduced the new cross-industry OpenUSD Development Certification exam, co-developed with USD community volunteers at the conference, providing a professional credential recognized by AOUSD members, including Pixar, Adobe, Autodesk, and NVIDIA.
Trimble Dimensions (November)
Trimble continued to strengthen the connection between OpenUSD and the architecture, engineering, and construction industries through Trimble Dimensions 2025. AOUSD leaders and partners took the 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.
Microsoft Ignite (November)
At Microsoft Ignite 2025, AOUSD members Microsoft and NVIDIA collaborated on “Composable Bindings: Simplified System Integration,” a whitepaper and session demonstrating how OpenUSD, CloudEvents, and OpenTelemetry work together to enable scalable digital twins. The approach addresses integration complexity—one of the most significant barriers to AI adoption in industrial operations—by providing flexible, standards-based connections between data systems and 3D visualization and simulation engines.
AOUSD Summit 2025
Our second annual AOUSD Summit signaled the Alliance’s growing maturity, marked by a clear shift towards active contribution and standardization. Hosted by Autodesk, in-person attendance rose 26% year-over-year to 73 attendees representing 29 companies, successfully facilitating meaningful member connections, aligning OpenUSD roadmaps with community input, and showcasing year-two achievements.
Key highlights included:
- Core Specification 1.0 ratification at year’s end—a critical milestone establishing OpenUSD as a production-ready open standard
- Physics Rigid Body Specification draft complete—with the initial draft accepted by vote at the end of October, our first domain-specific specification following the Core Spec foundation
- DEI outreach initiatives—including the publication of our Inclusive Language Guide developed in collaboration with the Academy Software Foundation
- Technical execution focus—shifting from high-level strategy to hands-on standardization work, with lessons from Core Spec 1.0 lighting the way for all working groups
Domain-specific breakthroughs shared at the Summit included the introduction of “Newton” for PhysX/MuJoCo interoperability, ESRI’s leadership on geospatial Coordinate Reference Systems in USD, and the Alliance for Open Media’s new mesh compression standard demonstrating approximately 46% efficiency improvements over Draco.
Member satisfaction remained strong, with 80% of attendees strongly agreeing the Summit was a valuable use of their time. As one attendee noted: “I was able to understand AOUSD’s concrete vision for the future. Many of the opinions shared during the discussion resonated with me… this event made AOUSD feel like a much more familiar and accessible community.”
Technical Progress and Development
Core Specification 1.0: The Journey
The ratification of Core Specification 1.0 represents the culmination of years of intensive collaboration. This foundational specification establishes a universal language for the 3D ecosystem, enabling interoperability across simulation, digital twins, and world-building.
The journey involved structured Working Group sessions, extensive balloting periods, and valuable lessons learned along the way. Key insights included:
- The process revealed key documentation and clarity gaps that the specification effort helped address
- Rapidly evolving technology requires incremental approaches and scoped focus
- Standardization requires balancing immediate progress with the stability needed to support a growing base of adopters
Core Specification 1.0 serves multiple critical functions:
- Definitive Reference: Acts as the official guide for all future AOUSD projects
- Testing Framework: Establishes clear baseline compliance and testing
- Enabling Innovation: Enables independent projects to be built with confidence
- Foundation for Growth: Sets the stage for specialized, domain-specific standards
The Working Group has released sample implementations and compliance testing tools, including List Ops and USDA/USDC parsers showcased at SIGGRAPH, with additional components for document data model, composition, and value clips prepared for end-of-year release. A compliance rubric has also been developed to help implementers determine their conformance to the specification.
Working Groups Achievements
Materials Working Group
The Materials Working Group made substantial progress toward standardizing material definitions. Key achievements include:
- Collaborated with the MaterialX TSC to create a new, separate specification for Standard Nodes—a complete document that can be updated to normative language and incorporated into the USD specification
- Merged the first PR of formatting improvements to the Standard Nodes specification, fully vetted by the MaterialX TSC, with a new format that is more rigorous and machine-parseable
- Additional PRs of improvements to MaterialX PBR and NPR Nodes now in progress
Geometry Working Group
The Geometry Working Group focused on specifications for surfaces, shapes, and volumes in both virtual and physical worlds. Progress includes:
- Draft specifications completed for Imageable, Xformable, Gprim, BasisCurves, Points, and Scope
- In-progress work on Mesh and Implicit Primitives (Sphere, Cube, etc.) specifications
- Development of BREP (Boundary Representation) support for USD, including schema, supporting use case document, glossary, and FAQ—with limited internal release for feedback
- Next steps include drafting all surface primitives, delivering the BREP schema in OpenUSD to unblock further pipeline explorations and discussions, and volumetrics work
Physics Working Group
Formed in January 2025, the Physics Working Group achieved significant progress in its first year:
- Held 20 biweekly meetings throughout the year
- Voted to accept the draft Physics specification document focused on Rigid Bodies at the end of October
- Began discussions on deformable bodies
The Working Group learned that the specification process, while time-consuming, proved invaluable in exposing documentation and definition gaps in the original schemas.
OpenUSD Releases
Four major OpenUSD releases throughout 2025 delivered steady progress across interoperability, accessibility, animation, and performance—each building on the last to strengthen the platform’s foundations.
OpenUSD v25.02 set the tone for the year by expanding into content interoperability domains. This release introduced MaterialX/OpenPBR support and a new schema for color space management, while the validation framework matured with all usdchecker rules ported to a new C++-based system. Animation workflows also improved with support for spline-driven translates, rotates, and scales.
OpenUSD v25.05 broadened the platform’s reach with a focus on accessibility and developer experience. Working with Apple’s accessibility experts, this release introduced the AccessibilityAPI schema—ensuring OpenUSD works for everyone. New user guides for UsdLux, Primvars, and UsdUI made onboarding easier, while Vulkan graphics backend support expanded rendering options. Crate versioning was also streamlined for better compatibility across the ecosystem.
OpenUSD v25.08 delivered three milestone features. Spline Animation became fully functional with tangent controls and a new Spline Viewer in usdview, enabling robust animation interchange and introspection between applications. UsdImaging 2.0 reached feature parity with UsdImaging 1.0 while enabling a more programmable rather than fixed function approach when bridging scenegraphs to rendering and simulation backends via chains of scene index processing and new plugin points for proceduralism. This release also marked the first preview of OpenExec, a framework for expressing and evaluating computational behaviors in OpenUSD scenes.
OpenUSD v25.11 completed the year’s progression by making many of these advances the new defaults. UsdImaging 2.0 became the default code path, and the validation framework integrated directly into usdview for easier content checking. For simulation workflows, nested rigid bodies support improved alignment with a broader range of robotics setups. New UI Hints further organize how applications display interface elements, while performance optimizations delivered notable gains—including 2.3x faster SdfPath operations and 12% faster composition dependency computations.
Looking Ahead to 2026
With Core Specification 1.0 now established, AOUSD enters 2026 with an important opportunity: build on a stable foundation while accelerating the domain-specific standards and developer pathways that make OpenUSD easier to adopt, implement, and rely on.
Industry trends and opportunities
Across physical AI, robotics, industrial digital twins, construction/infrastructure, and content pipelines, the demand for interoperable, standards-based 3D workflows is accelerating. OpenUSD is increasingly positioned to serve as the connective tissue between tools, platforms, and industries.
What’s Next in USD Specification
Our specification roadmap for 2026 includes:
- Physics Rigid Body Specification 1.0: Targeting Q2 2026 ratification following IP review, with work beginning on deformables specification draft
- Base Geometry Specification Draft: Prioritized specifications to standardize USD geometry schemas depended upon by the Physics 1.0 specification
- Materials Specification: Completing MaterialX nodes for USD documentation and the UsdShade specification
- Core Specification 1.1: Fast-follow release including animation spline feature parity, variable expressions, path expressions, built-in applied schemas, and compliance rubric improvements
- Journey to ISO: Defining strategy and timeline for ISO JTC1 PAS submission of specifications
Strategic Priorities and Roadmap
Looking ahead, the Steering Committee has outlined an ambitious but focused set of goals for 2026, shaped by community input and lessons learned from our first two years.
Standardization remains our foundation. With Core Specification 1.0 complete, we’ll define what comes next—both for future core versions and for composed data specifications in physics, materials, and geometry. We’re also developing a clear strategy and timeline for ISO submission, recognizing that international standardization requires careful planning. A key focus will be defining compliance pathways: what’s required versus optional, and how multi-part specifications work together.
Evolution means growing the ecosystem. We’re committed to strengthening collaboration between AOUSD, Pixar’s OpenUSD development, and the Academy Software Foundation—ensuring open source innovation and standardization move forward together. We’ll expand OpenUSD’s reach to additional operating systems and browsers, supported by outbound education efforts including a “Core Spec World Tour” to help the community understand and adopt the new standard. We’re also reviewing our liaison relationships and exploring new partnerships, with OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) among the candidates.
Development focuses on reducing friction. The Build Interest Group has been gathering requirements to streamline OpenUSD development, and we’re committed to implementing their recommendations for infrastructure and CI/CD processes. We’ll continue building out compliance testing tools, parsers, and test frameworks. Strategic sponsorship of OpenUSD-related projects—like Adobe’s file format plugins and lightweight readers/writers—will help data flow smoothly into and out of the ecosystem.
Growth centers on community and adoption. We want to hear from members about what’s working and where we’re falling short. The DEI Interest Group’s academic outreach will help build the next generation of OpenUSD developers. We’ll invest in training materials and explore certification programs building on NVIDIA’s OpenUSD Development certification. Perhaps most importantly, we’ll provide clearer guidance on how to adopt AOUSD standards—because great specifications only matter if people can implement them.
New frontiers are emerging. While standardization takes time, we’re tracking exciting new use cases: geospatial applications, data mapping from other standards (URDF, MTConnect, IFC5), emerging geometry like Gaussian Splats, volumetric representations, and camera/games workflows in partnership with ASWF. These represent the future of where OpenUSD can make an impact.
Stay Connected
We extend our gratitude to members, contributors, and partners for their dedication and support. Together, we are shaping the future of 3D technology and creating a more interoperable, innovative, and inclusive ecosystem for all.
Here’s to an impactful 2026!
Steve
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