OpenUSD + Interactivity for XR Experience Description (USDI-XRED)

Current and near-future NASA missions are facing significant challenges that Extended Reality (XR) systems may help address. DigitalFish proposes a novel approach to fulfilling the content-infrastructure demands of current and future XR systems - OpenUSD and Interactivity for XR Experience Description (USDI-XRED). Our solution offers a common representation for vendor-agnostic, high-fidelity XR experiences supporting distribution and consumption of and collaboration with peta-scale datasets. It builds on proven crossover technology from Media & Entertainment, with industry standard underpinnings backed by a broad industry working group, expanded and adapted for NASA’s unique needs within XR and interactivity across diverse devices. USDI-XRED innovations include: • Extending USD with new schemas supporting XR, interactivity and interchange • Providing a reference implementation and dataset exercising these extensions • Introducing a validation layer for targeting the restricted functionality on any given deployment platform • Demonstrating the suitability and sufficiency of the extensions through user testing • Documenting a best-practices approach to scalable, vendor-agnostic XR content built on top of USD, the new schemas, and the new validation layer. We will use the funding to: • Develop a system design and implementation extending core OpenUSD to support key elements for XR, interactivity and interchange. • Provide an example scene dataset, relevant to one or more NASA mission objectives, demonstrating novel capabilities and supporting user testing. • Validate the sufficiency, flexibility, and device independence of USDI-XRED’s interactivity model and validation layer through qualitative user testing. Target markets include: media & entertainment, manufacturing, aerospace & defense, architecture / engineering / construction, oil and gas, education, health and medicine, public safety, defense, aviation, maritime and shipping, and industrial safety.