Khronos 3D Commerce Working Group Provides Sneak Peek into Upcoming Real-time Asset Creation Guidelines for Retail and E-Commerce

The 3D virtual representation of products is becoming pervasive in online retail across desktops, browsers, mobile phones and AR/VR devices. The Khronos® 3D Commerce™ Working Group is working to build industry consensus around guidelines, standards and certification programs to streamline 3D content creation, management and deployment for Ecommerce, including online ads and search results. The Working Group has the support of over 80 industry-leading retailers, technology vendors and manufacturers.

Scaling the use of 3D in retail to industrial levels will create significant commercial opportunities for all companies involved

One of the key 3D Commerce Working Group deliverables will be Real-time Asset Creation Guidelines for 3D artists using polygonal authoring workflows but who may not be familiar with the challenges associated with the widespread deployment of 3D assets that perform and look consistent across diverse end user devices. 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 merchants 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. This summary has been published in Markdown on GitHub under the CC BY 4.0 license. Khronos is inviting feedback, suggestions and contributions from the industry to help guide and improve the full guidelines. The outline guidelines can also be downloaded as a PDF.

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 that will provide valuable insights for DCC and technology companies as well as the technical artist community. The 3D Commerce Working Group will maintain and evolve the guidelines to track developments in the 3D Commerce ecosystem over time.

So, please take a look at the published summary, and let us know what YOU would like to see in the full version of the 3D Commerce Real-time Asset Creation Guidelines! If you’re interested in participating in the 3D Commerce Working Group, drop us a note at [email protected] to learn how to become a Khronos member and get involved!