 Hi, this is your host of the party and today we have with us once again Guy Martin, director of open source and standards at NVIDIA and today we are going to talk about a new foundation Alliance for OpenUSD or universal scene description. So there are a lot of talk about today but guys once again great to see you. Good to see you Swap. Talk a bit about what is Alliance for OpenUSD also when we look at Linux Foundation it's foundation of foundation. So I also want to understand the organizational structure of this project or foundation. And I think we should even go back back to the beginning of what is OpenUSD right? So OpenUSD stands for open universal scene description. It's the technology that Pixar came up with to be able to effectively describe anything in a 3D scene and they use this for their movies because they need to be able to describe objects lighting backgrounds all of that stuff. And so they open sourced this in about 2015 and what they found was that the reason they did that is that it was really really important for them to be able to work effectively and share 3D content but they realized that there were a lot of other people out there that needed to do the same thing. And originally that was in the visual effects and film and media and entertainment industries but what ended up happening was a lot of other organizations NVIDIA among them realized that hey we all have to be able to do the description of 3D scenes effectively in our case in our Omniverse platform and so we started adopting this. So fast forward a few years and as we know SWAP very well that open source projects are awesome wonderful we love being a part of that community but when you get to a certain point with an open source project if you want greater adoption you need to think about standardization especially with a fundamental technology like OpenUSD. We like to think of this as almost the HTML moment of 3D right. HTML started out it wasn't really standardized multiple implementations things started to fragment a little bit. We're at a point with OpenUSD where obviously we don't want that to happen we believe and so does Pixar and all the other members of this new alliance believe that it's really important for this technology to become a standard and to allow for multiple interoperable implementations. So we founded the alliance obviously you saw the announcement and we're really excited about it because I think it is an opportunity to do an open standard right to do a standard that is royalty free and to do a standard that allows multiple folks to come in and help define what is the core of OpenUSD and have there be complementary and interoperable implementations obviously Pixar's is the first implementation that that has been developed. What is the need for this alliance because as you also said that project was on OpenUSD was already open source by Pixar so what was the need for building an alliance around the project. I think it's really important for standardization in SWAP you know I have a background in open source but open also open standards as well two years running Oasis Open and I think I got a big education not only there but also in other projects around standardization to recognize that open source is awesome but you also need a standard for fundamental technologies like this and there's two main reasons one I touched on a little earlier which is the ability to have alternate implementations that retain compatibility right so you have implementations maybe in a different language in a different technology stack that are needed but I think the other important thing is that there is a comfort factor there is a factor that businesses can recognize hey I something like OpenUSD being a standard I can rely on it right I can build my business on it I can build my technology stack on it knowing that it's going to be supported and continue to be maintained so there's there's a little bit of that that business comfort factor around making sure that something is a standard. I once again want to talk about the the organizational structure of this one is it part of any existing foundation or it's going to be a new foundation within its own right. You know there was a lot of thought as to where where standardization for OpenUSD could go and a lot of people had different opinions and different thoughts as to where this should go whether it should fold into an existing project or standards body. The founding members were having a lot of conversations about where we should build this USD standardization effort and one of the things that we all agreed on is that coming to the Linux Foundation's joint development foundation gave us the opportunity to have what I would call the best of both worlds have the necessary rigor that needs to be in place so that you can take any standards that we develop and take them to an international standards body like ISO or others so you need to have that rigor you need to have those processes but also we needed a flexible governance model I think one of the things that has been a little bit of a problem sometimes in the standards world people look at standards and go oh my gosh it's going to be three years before we get anything right. OpenUSD as a technology is evolving fast enough that we needed a flexible governance model that let us adapt and innovate at the scale and the speed that OpenUSD was was going but again also have the right the right balance of rigor so that when we create a specification it can become an international standard. That's extremely important if you look at things like HTML right they're not just North America they became an international standard so again I think we we look at this as a similar HTML moment but for the 3D ecosystem. Can you also talk about what are the other you know foundation the Linux Foundation that you folks are already working together are you're looking forward hey these are the perfect sync that we should be working with closely with them? Well I mean Academy Software Foundation is the most obvious answer there because they already even though they don't host the OpenUSD project there are several OpenUSD working groups where practitioners of OpenUSD are doing their work so I think it's extremely important and we're actually pursuing a liaison agreement an official liaison agreement with with the Academy Software Foundation because we believe that the work that's already going on in media and entertainment within OpenUSD is the perfect opportunity to to have some of that work inform what's going on in the standard. There are also other possibilities at some point down the line within within the Linux Foundation potentially things like the Open3D Foundation that is working on on on 3D engines but I think it's more than just what's going on in the Linux Foundation we we have said you know a lot of people have have brought up well what about Kronos and what about the GLTF standard which is is a great 3D delivery format standard and our intention we're already pursuing a liaison agreement with Kronos from from AOUSD because it's really really important for USD and GLTF to work effectively together there's a lot of companies that have made significant investments in both ecosystems and and it's our job to make sure that we have great collaboration on standards that can work together. Are there other standards or other bodies which are doing because you know there may be some time overlapped there may be some time gaps where do you see yeah some work is going on and you're also looking for collaboration or you see that hey yeah they are doing something but this is the gap that we are trying to fill. If you break it down today people look at USD as a great authoring format right a great editing format and also some some amount of runtime and GLTF is a great runtime and delivery lightweight runtime and delivery format for for 3D content and really I think what we're what we're seeing is we want to make sure that both of those kind of meet somewhere in the middle so that we actually don't have gaps right and I think there is people like to there are a lot of people that like to pit GLTF and USD together against each other and I think that's actually not the case there's a lot of opportunity for great collaboration so that you know both of those those standards fulfill what what they were designed to do. Since the focus of you know this alliance is mostly on a standard but when we look at OpenUSDA is there any code also going to get involved that is totally different or out of the scope at this moment. Yeah well the scope of the organization is to develop the standard right and I think the the very first thing that we were doing is standing up at what we call a core specification working group the the governance model of A OUSD allows us to have multiple working groups the first one we're standing up is the core specification working group and their job is going to be to take a look at the the Pixar code base and basically agree on what what is considered the core right the core pieces of of that technology and then once that is defined the reference implementation for that core is already written it's the it's the Pixar OpenUSD repository but then you can imagine after we get that core done or as we're getting that core finalized you're going to have a lot of other working groups that probably need to be started up everything from physics to animation rigging materials solid modeling the list goes on and those working groups as they as they begin to build their standard are probably going to need some reference implementations and there so there there is a possibility that there could be some code built as a reference implementation that would live within A OUSD but the the benefit obviously is if you have a standard and you have multiple reference implementations you know you have you have that ability to to pick and choose and kind of have the the best of both worlds and the and the best fit for a fit of purpose for for implementations that conform to the standard. Can you talk about who are the existing members and what other players that you are looking at working closely with? The first five founding members of this alliance are Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk and those was here at NVIDIA and you know as we as we got this group together I think we think it represents a great cross-section of companies that are not only from different parts of the industry but also who the companies who have been doing the most amount of work within OpenUSD today to to make it better and to continue to improve it but we recognized as we were building this alliance that obviously couldn't be just those five companies we needed a broad cross-section of support so we're really excited that when we launched this we were able to secure seven additional general members in addition to our our founding members and those general members are Cesium, Epic, Foundry, Hexagon, Ikea, SideFX and Unity. So again a great cross-section of both media and entertainment spaces, industrial, architectural and AZ so I think it's a great group we're looking forward to obviously having additional general members additional companies that want to come on board with us and and help help define this standard. I mean I think it's it's again a watershed moment similar to what HTML was in the 2D world. Everything that we have today in 3D is just going to continue to increase right we're we're talking about not only you know describing 3D scenes in movies but we're talking about digital digitalizing physical processes right building factories you know digital twins of things that are are in the real world we we need the equivalent of that in 3D in in the in the virtual world. Since you know you mentioned the word virtual and of course Linux function you folks also have Metaverse Foundation as well and next year when Apple comes up with Vision Pro it will once again just like this airport and all those things that change the whole industry we will see a lot of you know progress in that. How do you see the scope of this alliance and also a lot of open source projects that you earlier mentioned when we look at the whole virtual reality world or you see no no the scope of this alliance is limited to to what we are doing in this space. I think the scope of AOSD goes you know basically into whatever whatever you want to call is a 3D world right some people call it Metaverse some people call it industrial digitalization but I think what's interesting and important is that it's all 3D it's 3D content it's taking things that you have in the real world and making a full fidelity visualization digital twin of of that thing right that's that's one big use case and I think that use case is the one where I see a lot of growth going forward right I mean you you do a lot of pre-visualization now right 3D design of buildings and factories that stuff has been going on for a while we're now I think ready to take the next step beyond just pre-visualization and actually building a full scale replica full replica that is what we call a digital twin right something that you not only can see what is going what this thing is going to be before you build it in real life but actually once it's built and you've got sensors and you've got everything that's that's already a part of that physical thing feeding data back into a live visual twin it's the whole it's the whole premise of what we're building an omniverse and video and it's really exciting because it's kind of we like to say almost like a time machine right you can see what's happening at the beginning before you build something in real life and then when you actually build the thing you can you can see what's going on in real time and if there's a fault if there's something that happens you just have to rewind you can do a root cause analysis of what caused that thing and then you can also we like to say jump ahead into the future right I think this is where a lot of the exciting stuff around AI and generative AI and synthetic data generation right not only factories but but things like you know autonomous driving you want to be able to have something where you can train an AI on all the possible combinations and the only way to actually do that effectively is to synthetically generate the data under all the different possible conditions and maybe some conditions that we can even imagine as humans generate all that data have the AI do that and learn right and learn in an advanced way way faster than in real time and again USD is the absolute core of all that because you've got to be able to effectively describe that 3d scene and not just what it looks like but what happens with materials right what happens when you hit hit a material with a radar or a lidar right so the thing that we loved about USD and the reason we made it the core of Omniverse is that its extensibility is really really important but now you want you want to have extensibility we know this right you want to have extensibility but you also want to have the ability to have interoperability so I think that's where this foundation is really going to and this alliance is really going to focus is on that interoperability piece what kind of organizations you are looking that should become part of this alliance where you do see hey those will add value at the same time they'll get a lot of value by joining this alliance obviously we can't talk about folks that we're currently approaching right now but I think it's really important that anybody that wants to come in and have something to do with 3d right and that could be anybody from systems level vendors to you know vendors of technologies that are used in AECO right or manufacturing so I think we've talked about before you and I in the past swap that you know pretty much anybody who's involved in building something in the physical world today is a software company to some degree right they they need software and so if they need to describe something as a 3d scene it's really really important that you know that if they want to help both drive the standard as well as understand what the standard is going to be around how to describe 3d content in open usd that we welcome them to come join AOSC we welcome them to come join us in the alliance one more exciting thing about this technology there are certain technologies which are limited to certain you know industries but they're certain like if you remember only days we used to talk about hey digital transformation cloud and you're like you should be you should have a software presence you know otherwise you're comfortable not exist then you're like hey you should have cloud then we'll start talking about AIML is very critical otherwise similarly as you're saying html was core to 2d world the word that we're moving towards and it's just a matter of time that things will be 3d it's not just that we will be wearing glasses but a lot of things that we are doing I mean we will be getting rid of all these you know two-dimensional screens do you also see that as you're saying that the company whichever is planning to 3d art you think it is right to say that companies of course is too early at this time that eventually every company should have presence in the 3d world just the way every company now has a website or a cloud presence I think that's that's the world we're going to right the world that we're going to is 3d right we've lived in in 2d world and and text and flat content for a long time and that will still continue to exist I don't think anybody is thinking that that's going to go away but I mean more and more you're going to have both consumer level experiences right gaming those sorts of things you know immersive immersive entertainment but even more importantly things that are coming around around XR AR being able to take and augment what's in the in the in the physical world as well as simulate what's in the physical world right I think to me that's the most exciting area of innovation that's that's coming up is gaming is fantastic right we all love gaming and we love gaming at Nvidia clearly but I think we also see a huge huge potential for what we're calling industrial digitalization right these industrial processes which we've only taken advantage of from a technology standpoint again in that pre-visualization hey let me let me you know build this thing you know in a virtual world before I build it in real life that that next step that next core leap is going to be don't just pre-visualize it but actually have that digital twin where you're interacting with that physical thing in a virtual world and taking advantage of all of the kinds of of things you can do by being able to simulate things in real time and by being able to to do root cause analysis when when things go wrong in the physical side just give us a kind of glimpse of what are the things that you folks are working on you'll be working on this year I think the first thing the alliance has to do is actually build out the core specification it's the reason that the core specification working group was the one that we started with as we launched but I think you're probably going to have to see can't make promises in this first year but I think one that keeps coming up repeatedly is materials I think materials is something that is going to be super important as we go forward in 3d not only just from how things look but again in an industrial digitalization case how things behave right how things react can you can you build and make sure you have a solid set of interoperable material standards so that you can describe how something looks but also how it behaves in in the real world I think those that that's that's a big one one thing for the AOSD is that as as the governing board I'm a member of the governing board is governing board our job is to make sure that you know we proceed at a pace that allows us to have innovation but make sure that we get work done right that the core output of of this alliance is is a standard and a specification and so making sure that we get the core specification up and running and smoothly developed is going to be super important and then I think you'll probably see probably towards the end of our first year where we'll start to make some adjustments and figure out what other working groups make sense yeah thank you so much for taking time out today and of course talk about this alliance on OpenUSD thanks for all those insights and I would love to chat with you again when as you said you know a lot of things are in the pipeline I would love to talk about those as well thank you yeah thanks WAP we're super excited and appreciate the chance to chat with you today