Khronos Blog Archives

Standards development is a highly collaborative undertaking within and across standards development organizations (SDOs). We are active in both 3GPP and MPEG working groups, and our work on mobile applications for 3GPP inspired us to tackle an emerging challenge within MPEG: interactive scene description for XR applications. Ultimately, our search for a scene description format that could be used for last-mile XR scene description and

Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) is a high-performance, extensible software platform for collaboratively creating, editing, and simulating complex 3D scenes. OpenUSD is more than a file format and scene representation—it's an extensible framework of libraries, tools, and plugins. This includes the Hydra rendering framework, an open source OpenUSD framework that decouples scene descriptions from renderers, and the Storm renderer, a rasterizer aimed at performance and scalability.

ANARI™ is the industry’s open standard, cross-platform 3D rendering engine API developed by the Khronos Group to provide portable access to sophisticated 3D functionality including ray tracing and global illumination. ANARI is already widely used by scientific visualization applications and is implemented over multiple rendering engines, including AMD’s RadeonProRender, Intel’s OSPRay, and NVIDIA’s VisRTX, among others. ANARI is developed with full public access to the specification and has recently incorporated significant community feedback, including improvements to the object interface, better error handling through guaranteed API stream robustness, revamped runtime feature queries, directly mapped array parameters, improved volume shading, and compatibility with the Khronos glTF™ Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) materials.