Standards in Visualization

Standards in visualization has a profound impact on the ability for an industry to produce portable and interoperable applications. 

• The Khronos Group

NIST has a long-standing relationship (and membership) with the Khronos Group. We are active in the continuing evolution of glTF (commonly known as the JPEG of 3D) and our participation is with the 3D Formats group, in addition we participate with the 3D Commerce group, the OpenXR group and ANARI. 

3D Formats is the group focused on the continuing development of glTF. glTF's major strength is that is a simple and straightforward format which can be very efficiently transmitted making it idea for Web based applications. In addition, recent addition to the materials model using PBR (Physically Based Rendering) extentions is greatly improving the visual fidelity of the models. 

3D Commerce is particularly concerned with the visual fidelity of 3D models as the models are typically placed on a web site for sale. It is critical that when a consumer purchases a product only seen via a 3D model on the site that it arrives and looks like what they expect. 
OpenXR provides interoperable interfaces to physical devices such as Head Mounted Display (HMD) and controllers. Code written to conform to OpenXR is more likely to behave as expected with different vendors of HMDs and controllers improving the overall interoperability of the VR/AR/XR experience.

ANARI is particularly important to improving the interoperability of scientific visualization. ANARI provides an API to help make the visualization code typically written for a scientific application more portable. We are extending Para View to support ANARI (via a plugin).
 

• Metaverse Standards Forum

The Metaverse Standards Forum (MSF) with over 2500 members is explicitly not a Standards Development Organization (SDO). It turns out that while the MSF doesn't develop the actual standards it does provide a neutral forum for lots of other organizations to talk to each other. It's no small feat and everyone is focused on identifying key issues for the Metaverse and feeding the information to actual SDOs. 

NIST is a member of the MSF and participates primarily in the 3D Asset Interoperability group. This is the group primarily concerned with the interoperability between USD and glTF (and any other relevant 3D standards). Of particular interest now is work with material properties. There are several de-facto standards in this domain such as MaterialX (originally developed by Lucasfilm) and the PBR (Physically Based Rendering) extensions to glTF. 

In addition, USD (formerly a proprietary format developed by Pixar) is moving to an open standards development via AOUSD (Alliance for Open Universal Scene Description). AOUSD. USD is supported by a wide variety of industries for the "metaverse" however clearly no one format will become "the" standard. USDs history comes from the film industry which has different requirements then real time and web-based applications. One of the strengths of working with MSF is to promote useful interoperability between USD and glTF in an open standards development environment.

See also:

-Rheology

To date, we have released three Standard Reference Materials (SRMs) -
• one for cement paste (NIST SRM2492),
• one for mortar (NIST SRM2493), and
• one for concrete (NIST SRM 2497).

- Computation of Atomic Properties 
 

The computations result in published properties that make their way into Standard Reference Data (SRD).