How OpenUSD and AI Are Building Smarter Virtual Worlds - Ep. 268

Hello, and welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm your host, Noah Kravitz. Today, we're talking about the future of collaboration in three d. Universal scene description, Open USD, is revolutionizing three d graphics and simulation, especially when you combine it with the latest in physical AI. The technology is transforming industries from manufacturing to robots. And here to explain what Open USD is and why it works so well together with AI is NVIDIA's Aaron Luke. Aaron is a director of product management for NVIDIA simulation technology, leading universal scene description ecosystem development. Aaron, welcome to the AI podcast. Hi, Noah. Good to be here. Great to have you. Thanks for taking the time, to join us. So, let's start kind of at the at the beginning and work our way up, if you will. What is Open USD, and why does it matter so much? That's right. So as you mentioned, Open USD, the USD stands for universal scene description. It's a project that was open sourced by Pixar animation studios in 2016, but it's the result of evolution of decades of data engineering at Pixar around, you know, basically three d world building. Three d world building among all the sort of disciplines that it requires for filmmaking, but it generalizes quite beautifully to world building in the industrial world and in the real world, as well too. So it's an open source project that also now is under the governance of the Alliance for Open Universal Scene Description, the AOUSD, in which, we are formalizing USD as industry standards, with a lot of great partners. Fabulous. And so what are some of the benefits? I mean, obviously, having an open source standardized framework for describing and and working with three d world is great in itself. But what are some of the particulars about OpenUST that, make it really great to work with? So the really interesting thing about USD is that it's designed to bring lots of different types of data sources together. In particular, it's called composition within USD and every document in USD is called a layer. So when you bring all these things together, you have these network of layer stacks, within USD that presents itself as a holistic composed scene graph. And every object in that scene graph is like an object in three d that you can do for movie making, but also for industrial layout and design. And the power of USD is all of that is abstracted from the actual data source and the actual data serialization, the actual formats. And this was a boon within Pixar because like I said, every type of artist, within Pixar, whether they're doing, modeling animation, effects animation with with physics and and other simulation, lighting, all that kind of stuff, they They might have different tools. They might have different ways of working, with things. And what Pixar did was that they kind of unified them all around these common data …