SimReady Maturity Phases#

SimReady specifications are not created overnight. Each Requirement, Feature, and Profile evolves through multiple maturity phases, gradually reaching the level of completeness and rigor necessary for submission to AOUSD.

SimReady Specification Maturity Phases

Phases Overview#

Incubation / Prototyping#

In this first phase:

  • A specification exists, but is early, informal, and might not yet follow the final formatting or structure of a standard.

  • It is essentially a list of rules or guidelines that allow content creators to begin achieving “SimReady-compatible” output that allows simulation results in at least one runtime.

  • Multiple competing or overlapping approaches can exist at this stage. The goal is to surface them and begin converging toward a unified direction.

Draft#

After competing specs have converged, the unified specification becomes a draft.

  • Still not broadly reviewed, but now cohesive enough to socialize for early ecosystem adoption.

  • The beginnings of workflow documentation and some baseline validation code are being developed to support the standardization efforts.

  • NVIDIA begins preparing to champion this baseline more broadly.

Internal Adoption#

At this phase, stakeholders within an organization align on the spec and adopt it in their own workflows. As an example, within NVIDIA this means teams such as SDG, Robotics, AI Factory, IsaacSim, and Research converge on a single unified stance.

  • Produces a consistent internal position before pursuing external standardization.

  • Builds confidence and reduces fragmentation before going to wider industry groups.

  • By this phase, there should be documentation (including workflow guides), validation code, and sample USD files that enable developers and creators to go end-to-end.

  • Any organization following the SimReady maturity model would go through an equivalent internal alignment phase before proposing specs externally.

AOUSD#

In this last phase, the proposed spec enters the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) approval pipeline.

  • This involves formal work packages, engineering work, sample implementations, compliance tests, draft periods, balloting, and IP/Legal review.

  • The goal: a fully ratified, industry-neutral open standard, backed by ecosystem adoption already built during earlier phases.

Resources#

See also