USD (Universal Scene Description) is Pixar’s open-source 3D scene format, designed for combining geometry, materials, lighting and animation from many sources into a single, layered description of a 3D scene. Open-sourced in 2016, USD is now the backbone of major 3D pipelines including Apple’s spatial computing stack and NVIDIA Omniverse. The familiar USDZ format is USD’s binary, archived variant, used for distribution and as the iOS Augmented Reality format.
USDZ stands for Universal Scene Description Zipped. It’s Apple’s 3D file format, built on Pixar’s open USD framework and introduced jointly by Apple and Pixar in 2018. A USDZ file is an uncompressed ZIP archive that packages the USD scene together with textures and audio into a single distributable file. It’s mainly used in Web AR to drop 3D objects into the user’s real environment via Apple Quick Look, directly from Safari.
Virtual Reality (VR) replaces the real world with a fully simulated, computer-generated environment. Where Augmented Reality adds to your surroundings, VR shuts them out: you put on a headset and your eyes and ears are taken into a different place entirely. It sits at the fully virtual end of the reality-virtuality continuum and, unlike Web AR, always depends on dedicated hardware.
Web AR, short for Web-based Augmented Reality, runs directly in the browser with no app install required from the user. A single link is enough to project a 3D model into the real environment. On iOS, Apple Quick Look takes over; on Android it’s the Google Scene Viewer; in regular browsers, libraries like model-viewer handle the 3D rendering.
WebGL stands for Web Graphics Library. It’s the browser API that lets web pages render interactive 2D and 3D graphics directly on the GPU, without a plugin. Based on OpenGL ES and supported by every modern browser, WebGL is the foundation that makes real-time 3D product viewers and Web AR possible on the open web.
WebXR is the open W3C API for AR and VR in the browser, where “XR” is generally read as Extended Reality, covering both. Maintained by the W3C Immersive Web Working Group as the successor to the older WebVR spec, WebXR lets developers write custom AR and VR scenes that run in a browser, with access to tracking, hit detection and sensor data. Because every WebXR experience is custom-coded, it is a different category of effort from the streamlined Apple Quick Look and Google Scene Viewer mechanisms most product AR uses.
XREAL Aura, first shown as Project Aura, is the first announced see-through AR glasses for Google’s Android XR. It uses an optical see-through display with a wide 70-degree field of view, XREAL’s X1S spatial chip alongside a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR processor, and offloads battery and compute to a tethered pocket puck. It is set to launch globally in 2026. As an Android XR device with a browser, it can display web 3D content, including pages built with PausAR Viewer.
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