Just to be clear, this isn't really a replacement for Collada or FBX. This is really intended for huge complex scenes that still contain live operators.
This also isn't really designed for WebGL because it is written in C++, thus it is really hard to get this to fit into the browser except as a server-streaming technology that just has a WebGL front end, which means that for most interactive WebGL experiences, this is not applicable.
It isn't really applicable to Unity because Unity is real-time and usually most things are baked if they are complex, where as Pixar's USD is designed for complex and huge scenes.
Yeah, one could also use NaCL, but that doesn't really solve the issue with local resource assumptions and a complex scripting environment. If you copy all the paradigms into the browser and it is fully dependent upon local resources, really why are you running it in the browser? Might as just run a native Python app that uses Qt.
Remember as well that in visual effects having a data set of 3TB was average a decade ago, it must be in the hundreds of TBs now. You really want to be accessing these as local resources over really good gigabit ethernet.
Some of it can be reused for sure, but a direct usage via asm.js will lead to a really poor experience.
Just to be clear, this isn't really a replacement for Collada or FBX. This is really intended for huge complex scenes that still contain live operators.
This also isn't really designed for WebGL because it is written in C++, thus it is really hard to get this to fit into the browser except as a server-streaming technology that just has a WebGL front end, which means that for most interactive WebGL experiences, this is not applicable.
It isn't really applicable to Unity because Unity is real-time and usually most things are baked if they are complex, where as Pixar's USD is designed for complex and huge scenes.