OpenUSD Expands to Power Interactive 3D Worlds and Digital Twins

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – March 25, 2026 – The digital world is learning to move. The Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), the organization steering the development of the 3D industry’s foundational language, today announced a major push into dynamic and interactive content. With the formation of a new interest group for characters and motion, and the addition of seven diverse new members, OpenUSD is rapidly evolving from a framework for static scenes into the definitive operating system for the next generation of 3D experiences, from industrial digital twins to the immersive internet.

This strategic expansion follows the recent landmark ratification of OpenUSD's Core Specification 1.0, a move that solidified the technology's grammar and syntax. Now, the alliance is building on that foundation, signaling a significant industry shift toward creating not just interoperable 3D objects, but entire interactive ecosystems that can be shared, simulated, and scaled across a vast array of software and hardware.

The 'HTML of 3D' Learns to Move

The most significant development is the launch of the Characters, Motion, and Interactivity (CMI) Interest Group. This new body is tasked with extending OpenUSD's capabilities beyond static architecture and geometry to standardize the very essence of living digital worlds: how characters move, express emotion, and interact with their surroundings. The group will focus on creating common standards for skeletal animation, blend shapes for facial expressions, and interactive behaviors.

For decades, transferring an animated character from one 3D application to another has been a notoriously difficult, often impossible, task plagued by broken rigs and lost data. The CMI group aims to solve this by establishing a universal blueprint for dynamic assets. This ensures a complex character created in one tool will look and behave identically in a different animation suite, a game engine, or an industrial simulation, preserving the integrity of the original creation.

"With the foundation of Core Spec 1.0 now in place, the industry's focus is shifting toward a joint strategy for dynamic, complex content," said Steve May, CTO of Pixar Animation Studios, the original creators of USD. May emphasized the CMI group's role as a vital forum for building the roadmap for how characters and motion move across the ecosystem, "ensuring that the 'HTML of 3D' is as interactive as it is interoperable."

This initiative positions OpenUSD to transcend the capabilities of other formats. While standards like glTF excel at the efficient delivery of 3D models—the "JPEG of 3D"—OpenUSD's strength lies in its powerful composition engine and non-destructive layering, designed from the ground up for massive, collaborative projects. By adding a robust framework for motion and interactivity, AOUSD is making a clear statement that OpenUSD is the designated language for building the metaverse.

Powering the Next Industrial Revolution

While the push for interactive characters captures the imagination, OpenUSD's momentum is equally, if not more, impactful in the industrial sector. The alliance highlighted a series of member milestones that demonstrate how the standard is becoming the critical backbone for physical AI and the industrial metaverse, where virtual-to-physical workflows are paramount.

NVIDIA, a founding member of the alliance, announced the general availability of its Omniverse DSX blueprint, which leverages OpenUSD to construct physically accurate, "SimReady" digital twins of AI factories. These are not mere visual models; they are virtual replicas pre-configured with physical and material properties, allowing companies to simulate and validate everything from power layouts to network infrastructure for gigawatt-scale facilities before a single physical component is installed.

This capability is being put into practice across the industry. Robotics firm PTC showcased a cloud-native workflow connecting its Onshape CAD software directly to NVIDIA's Isaac Sim. Using OpenUSD as the high-fidelity bridge, a robotics team can move a design from a CAD model to a realistic simulation environment in minutes, with the virtual model updating automatically as the design evolves. This seamless data flow is crucial for training and testing robots in complex virtual environments.

Software giants are also deepening their commitment. Autodesk's latest updates to its 3D modeling software, Maya, include a new Component Creator and Variant Manager, tools designed to drastically reduce the technical overhead for artists and engineers creating and managing complex OpenUSD assets. Meanwhile, Foundry's recent releases of its visual effects tools, Katana 9.0 and Nuke 17.0, integrate OpenUSD's advanced layering schemas directly into creative pipelines, enabling a single source of truth across disparate tools.

Even the cutting edge of 3D capture is being integrated. The latest version of OpenUSD introduced a native schema for 3D Gaussian splats, a technique for creating photorealistic 3D reconstructions from images. This allows hyper-realistic captures of real-world objects and scenes to exist natively alongside traditional 3D models, enabling smoother pipelines from capture to simulation.

A Widening Alliance For a Universal Standard

The technical advancements are bolstered by a strategic expansion of the alliance itself. The seven new general members underscore OpenUSD's expanding influence across a wide spectrum of industries: Aras, Booz Allen Hamilton, C-Infinity, Mobiltech, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., SGDL Innovation, and XGRIDS.

This new cohort brings critical expertise from sectors far beyond OpenUSD's origins in media and entertainment. The inclusion of Booz Allen Hamilton signals a deep interest from the national security sector in using OpenUSD as a "common translation layer" for integrating models in physical AI, digital engineering, and simulation. Meanwhile, the addition of Qualcomm, a giant in mobile and XR technology, is a major endorsement for OpenUSD's role in the future of augmented and virtual reality devices. As Lorenzo Casaccia, a VP at Qualcomm Technologies, noted, the company looks forward to "contributing its experience in enabling XR devices that support OpenUSD."

The industrial and manufacturing focus is strengthened by Aras, a product lifecycle management firm, and C-Infinity, an AI company focused on manufacturing workflows. They see OpenUSD as the key to connecting digital twins with the entire product lifecycle. This vision is shared by new members focused on spatial data, such as Mobiltech, which aims to build city-scale digital twins, and XGRIDS, which specializes in connecting real-world capture to simulation.

This broad and growing coalition is perhaps the most telling indicator of OpenUSD's future. By bringing together leaders from hardware, software, industrial automation, defense, and telecommunications, AOUSD is not just building a technical specification; it is fostering a global ecosystem committed to a single, open standard for 3D content. With the core foundation set and a clear roadmap for adding dynamic life and intelligence to its virtual worlds, OpenUSD is solidifying its position as the essential, universal language for the next era of spatial computing.