By George Lawton
The universal scene description (USD) language and format are rapidly being adopted as a Rosetta stone to translate data among 3D tools, game engines, digital twins and ecommerce offerings. It still has a way to go, but, it’s the best hope the industry has to unify workflows and user experiences across the metaverse. At the Nvidia GTC Conference, experts weighed in on USD’s history, current use cases, drawbacks and whether it could become the HTML of the 3D Web.
When HTML was first introduced in 1993 it wasn’t a great thing. But it was the first serious effort to unify text, graphics and hyperlinks into a coherent interface, programming language and platform. It trumped the default approaches of the day like gopher and proprietary bulletin board services with funky fonts and poor layouts. And it was extensible across servers everywhere.
USD is in the same position today. It isn’t great at everything, but it does the best job among dozens of alternatives for sharing 3D assets across tools, services and platforms in an open and extensible way. USD is already helping companies like Ubisoft and Ikea simplify some 3D workflows and seeing traction with rendering engines like Unity and Unreal. That said, it still has a few limitations in rendering, cutting, and pasting models between worlds, materials, physics, and more sophisticated workflows.
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Continue reading here: Why USD Could Be The HTML For The Metaverse, Digital Twins And More