Industry group seeks standardization of 3D commerce assets

An open standards non-profit is working to build industry consensus around 3D content creation, management and deployment for e-commerce.

The 3D Commerce Group of the Khronos Group Inc. is creating guidelines, standards and certification programs to streamline the development of 3D e-commerce content, including online ads and search results. The working group has the support of over 80 retailers, technology vendors and manufacturers. Retail members include Ikea, Wayfair, and Target.

One of the key deliverables will be real-time asset creation guidelines for 3D artists. These tool-agnostic guidelines will provide best practices to help build efficient authoring pipelines to streamline the creation of 3D assets that can be easily and reliably used by retailers for real-time rendering on multiple delivery platforms.

In one of its first deliverables, the working group has published a sneak peek at the upcoming guidelines by releasing a high-level summary of the topics that will be covered, including file formats, coordinate systems, geometry, materials, textures, lighting and publishing targets. Khronos is accepting feedback, suggestions and contributions from the industry to help guide and improve the full guidelines. 

The group aims to publish the full version of the guidelines later in the year and will include example 3D asset creation workflows using popular 3D tools, including tooling bottlenecks and pain points. The 3D Commerce Working Group will maintain and evolve the guidelines to track developments in the 3D Commerce ecosystem over time.