Companies work using their own resources, and that sometimes, they target the same audience. It's a competition, and there is no winner that takes all.

When dealing with a an emerging, lucrative market, all eyes are on the hype. And this is where standards are needed for reasons like: interoperability, quality assurance, innovation, security, globalization, user experience, and more.

In essence, standards are needed in in tech are like the rules of the game that keep everything running smoothly and foster progress.

So here, in the ever-evolving world of technology, standards are crucial.

This time, Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form what's called the 'Alliance for OpenUSD' to drive open standards for 3D content.

Created by Pixar Animation Studios, USD (Universal Scene Description) is a high-performance 3D scene description technology that offers robust interoperability across tools, data, and workflows.

It's a high-performance extensible software platform for collaboratively constructing animated 3D scenes, designed to meet the needs of large-scale film and visual effects production. The technology also allows robust interchange between digital content creation tools with its expanding set of schemas, covering domains like geometry, shading, lighting, and physics, as well as providing unique composition ability provides rich and varied ways to combine assets into larger assemblies, enables collaborative workflows so that many creators can work together with ease, and more.

In all, the technology is already known for its ability to capture artistic expression and streamline cinematic content production collaboratively.

Realizing that USD’s power and flexibility can make it an ideal for emerging new industries and applications, the companies form the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) to promote the open-sourced Pixar technology’s standardization, development, evolution, and growth.

The alliance seeks to standardize the 3D ecosystem by advancing the capabilities of Open Universal Scene Description.

The alliance aims to enable greater compatibility and broader adoption, integration, and implementation of the technology, by developing written specifications detailing the features of OpenUSD, and shall enable developers and content creators to describe, compose, and simulate large-scale 3D projects and build an ever-widening range of 3D-enabled products and services.

According to Pixar CTO Steve May, OpenUSD already enables robust interoperability between tools, data and workflows. The goal of the alliance is to establish this technology as a global standard.

Alliance members aim to make OpenUSD accessible to a wide range of industries and applications. Open collaboration is expected to expand the possibilities of 3D, including digital twins, the 3D Web, and augmented reality.

In all, the alliance allows the inclusion by other standards bodies into their specifications, in order to promote greater 3D tools and data interoperability.

AOUSD will also provide the primary forum for the collaborative definition of enhancements to the technology by the greater industry. The alliance invites a broad range of companies and organizations to join and participate in shaping the future of OpenUSD.

Apple that doesn't really operate a social media account on Twitter-turned X, announced its role on its own newsroom post on its website.

In addition to the five founding members, other well-known companies have already signaled their support for AOUSD.

General members include Epic Games, IKEA, Academy Software Foundation, Khronos Group, Unity, Foundry, SideFX, and Cesium.

The Linux Foundation’s JDF was chosen to house the project, as it will enable open, efficient, and effective development of OpenUSD specifications while providing a path to recognition through the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

And what's notable about the formation of AOUSD is that, Apple is joining because its Apple Vision Pro expected to launch in early 2024.

"OpenUSD will help accelerate the next generation of AR experiences, from artistic creation to content delivery, and produce an ever-widening array of spatial computing applications," said Mike Rockwell, Apple’s vice president of the Vision Products Group. "Apple has been an active contributor to the development of USD, and it is an essential technology for the groundbreaking visionOS platform, as well as the new Reality Composer Pro developer tool. We look forward to fostering its growth into a broadly adopted standard."

This happens because other founding members of AOUSD described the technology as the "HTML of the metaverse."

Joining the alliance should benefit Apple, as it just entered the spatial computer market.

Read: Apple Finally Enters The VR/AR Business By Introducing Spatial Computing With 'Apple Vision Pro'