Both Uber Technologies Inc. and Cruise, the autonomous vehicle division of General Motors Co. have open-sourced their visualization software as both attempt to make the technologies a standard.

Uber has open-sourced its Autonomous Visualization System, a standard for describing and visualizing autonomous vehicle perception, motion and planning data. It’s claimed to offer a powerful web-based toolkit to build applications for exploring, interacting and making important development decisions with that data.

“As a stand-alone, standardized visualization layer, AVS frees developers from having to build custom visualization software for their autonomous vehicles,” Uber’s engineering team said in a statement. “With AVS abstracting visualization, developers can focus on core autonomy capabilities for drive systems, remote assistance, mapping, and simulation.”

AVS has already found a willing audience as well. Two autonomous vehicle companies, Voyage Auto Inc. and Applied Intuition Inc., pledged to use it.

Cruise has taken a similar path, open sourcing Worldview, a visualization tool that supports 2-D and 3-D cameras, mouse and keyboard movement controls, click interaction and a suite of built-in drawing commands.

Worldview is built on top of WebGL and is described as hiding WebGL’s complexity behind a simple application programming interface, “translating ‘props’ into low-level primitives and simplifying the execution of GPU draw calls .”

As with Uber, Cruise sees the move to open-source the software as a way of finding more users and making it a standard, though it also described its impetus in a more altruistic fashion.

“We hope Worldview will lower the barrier to entry into the powerful world of WebGL, giving web developers a simple foundation and empowering them to build more complex visualizations,” Cruise said on Medium.

The moves came as a surprise given how secretive most companies in the market are.

The Verge described the move as an “unprecedented step in the world of closely guarded self-driving secrets,” though that it’s not: Tesla Inc. started releasing code and technology in a similar fashion back in May.

Image: Uber