3D Assets and the Metaverse Standards Forum: Why the format fight will decide who builds the next digital marketplace

How work on USD, glTF, and 3D metadata inside the Metaverse Standards Forum is quietly shifting the economics of virtual goods and small-studio survival

A product designer in Brooklyn uploads a photogrammetry scan of a chair and waits for it to appear intact in a retailer’s AR try-on, a game engine, and a web storefront. The chair arrives in three different formats, two texture sets, and one slightly offended skeleton animation that belonged to a completely different model; the sale never happens. That tiny failure is a business problem dressed as a technical one.

Most coverage treats interoperability as a developer convenience or a standards wonk hobby. The overlooked angle is that standards work is now a direct profit-and-loss lever for studios, stores, and 3D marketplaces that must decide whether to invest in one pipeline or maintain multiple. This article follows that sharper lens: standards are operational strategy, not optional infrastructure.

Why the clash between USD and glTF matters more than a format argument

The mainstream story is simple: glTF makes 3D delivery fast and efficient and USD handles heavy authoring and scene composition. That surface framing is accurate but incomplete. The real question is how to make high-fidelity authored assets travel cheaply across commerce, simulation, and web runtimes without repeated manual fixes and costly reworks.

Standards work is attempting to turn repeated labor into one-time engineering. If that works, platforms can scale product catalogs the way image hosting scaled photos, and the labor line item for asset conversion disappears. Or at least shrinks, which is enough to change pricing decisions. Someone had to say it out loud: standards can be a growth engine rather than an IT tax, which sounds boring until the spreadsheet proves it.

Who is actually coordinating this effort and why now

The Metaverse Standards Forum convenes companies and standards bodies to coordinate interoperability projects and working groups. The forum’s 3D Asset Interoperability group focuses explicitly on aligning USD and glTF workflows to reduce fragmentation, according to the Metaverse Standards Forum. That working group has run education sessions, interop tests, and targeted projects on materials, physics, and animation conversion.

Industry momentum accelerated when the Alliance for OpenUSD published a roadmap and added major members, signaling that production-grade USD is moving from studio-only workflows to broader toolchains, according to the Alliance for OpenUSD. glTF meanwhile continues to push as a runtime delivery format with growing tooling, validation, and PBR material support promoted by the Khronos Group. Together, these efforts make today a rare moment where the creative and delivery layers are being coordinated rather than left to ad hoc tool chains.

The core story in numbers, names, and dates

The Forum launched in mid 2022 and now counts thousands of participating organizations, which is meaningful for network effects and adoption signaling, according to reporting by GamesBeat that tracked the consortium’s incorporation and membership growth. The 3D Asset Interoperability working group chartered in early 2023 and has published projects and event notes documenting activities like a January 22, 2025 session on Gaussian splats and on-going alignment work for materials and physics. Those project lists and minutes show this is not a paper exercise but hands-on interoperability testing and roundtripping.

Khronos’ glTF ecosystem is explicitly designed for efficient runtime delivery and has matured PBR workflows to a point where it serves as a practical “JPEG of 3D,” according to Khronos Group materials that detail glTF’s tooling, validator, and extension roadmap. The practical result is a two-track reality: USD for production complexity and scene composition; glTF for cross-platform lightweight delivery. The question the Forum asks is how to make them play nicely without every studio rewriting exporters.

Materials and physics are the tectonic plates of 3D commerce

Material definitions and physics metadata are not sexy in headlines but they determine whether a sofa looks like suede or plastic and whether a product behaves plausibly in AR. The working group’s material and physics efforts are trying to align Pixar-style USD materials, glTF PBR, and community projects like MaterialX and OpenPBR into shared patterns. If the industry ends up with a small, agreed set of parameters for materials and simulation data, teams will stop choosing between fidelity and portability. Expect a few awkward compromises and one or two very practical standards wins. Also expect engineers to enjoy the rare thrill of building a converter that genuinely saves time, which is the emotional equivalent of finding an extra coffee in the office kitchen.

What this means for a business with 5 to 50 employees

A small studio that sells 3D assets or provides AR previews typically spends time converting and testing assets across engines. Assume a midweight developer charges fifty dollars per hour and that each asset takes two hours to clean for each target platform. Converting 100 SKUs for three target runtimes is 100 assets times 2 hours times 3 targets times fifty dollars equals thirty thousand dollars in labor. If standards work and a validated pipeline reduce conversion time to half an hour per target, the bill falls to seven thousand five hundred dollars, saving twenty-two thousand five hundred dollars. That saved capital can buy marketing, buy a junior hire, or simply extend the runway by several months. Small teams should care because their break even points often sit close to those numbers.

A retailer doing AR product visualization that scales to 1,000 SKUs will see these savings multiply and infrastructure costs shrink. Metadata standards work such as common taxonomy and composable NFT patterns from community projects speed discovery and reduce customer support tickets, which are tiny savings per item but large in aggregate for catalog businesses.

Standards are not an academic hobby; they are the infrastructure that turns bespoke 3D workflows into productized revenue.

The hard risks the press often ignores

Standardization can ossify the wrong choices. If a dominant format gains formal endorsement before key cases like procedural materials, physics templates, or Gaussian splats stabilize, the industry could entrench suboptimal defaults. There is also governance risk: standards bodies and alliances include large vendors whose incentives sometimes diverge from small developers. Fragmentation risk remains if some vendors favor proprietary extensions over shared extensions. Finally, adoption risk is real; standards reduce friction only if a critical mass implements validators and shipping tool chains.

What small teams should do in practical terms

Run a short audit of your asset pipeline and count time spent per SKU on conversion and bug fixes. Prioritize exporting to glTF for web and mobile experiences and maintain a USD master for production work when fidelity matters. Subscribe to the Forum’s working group updates, run a weekly validator pass using glTF tools, and track savings over the next two quarters. If the math above saves the business five to ten thousand dollars in six months, that is tangible proof to reallocate headcount or dev budget. No one will die testing one exporter; someone might live longer financially.

Looking ahead with purpose

If the Forum’s USD plus glTF alignment succeeds, expect faster time to market for 3D catalogs and a drop in the hidden cost of maintaining multi-format pipelines. That outcome will make immersive commerce more viable in practice not just in marketing decks.

Key Takeaways

• Industry coordination inside the Metaverse Standards Forum is actively aligning USD and glTF to reduce repeated asset conversions and lower operating costs.
• glTF’s runtime efficiency and USD’s production depth make them complementary if the community agrees on shared material, physics, and metadata patterns.
• Small studios can save thousands to tens of thousands of dollars by adopting validated exporters and running light validator-based CI for assets.
• Adoption risks include premature ossification, vendor governance tensions, and partial implementation that leaves conversion gaps.

Frequently Asked Questions

How will choosing glTF affect my online product catalog?
glTF optimizes delivery and runtime performance for web and mobile, making AR previews faster and smaller. Converting to glTF can reduce bandwidth and load times while preserving PBR material fidelity with current extensions.

Should a 10 person studio keep using USD for authoring?
Yes, USD remains valuable as a canonical authoring format for complex scenes and collaboration, especially if the studio does high fidelity assets. Keep a USD master and export to glTF for distribution to minimize rework.

What immediate tooling should a small team adopt to align with standards work?
Use the Khronos glTF validator, adopt exporter plugins for your DCC tools, and run automated checks in CI for texture formats and PBR parameters. These steps catch common failures before they reach customers.

Will standards work make smaller companies irrelevant?
No. Standards lower friction for distribution and discovery, which benefits small creators by reducing operational barriers and costs. The winners will be teams that move faster to implement validated pipelines.

How can a retailer estimate savings from standardization?
Audit conversion hours per SKU and multiply by hourly developer rates and number of targets. Then model reductions from adopting canonical pipelines; even modest reductions compound at catalog scale and translate to headcount or marketing budget.

Related Coverage

Readers interested in how standards affect pricing and platform strategy should explore coverage of 3D commerce, avatar interoperability, and metadata registries. The AI Era News should follow how validators, toolchain CI, and composable NFT profiles change discovery and monetization across marketplaces.

SOURCES: https://metaverse-standards.org/domain-groups/introduction-to-3d-asset-interoperability-working-group/, https://www.khronos.org/Gltf, https://aousd.org/news/alliance-for-openusd-unveils-roadmap-for-core-usd-specification-and-ecosystem-collaborations/, https://gamesbeat.com/metaverse-standards-forum-becomes-official-non-profit-industry-consortium/, https://mvmd.org/