The Metaverse Standards Forum, which unites major global standards organisations and firms to build interoperability for an open-source Metaverse, announced its opening on Tuesday.
The Khronos Group has hosted the groundbreaking consortium of Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) to explore methods to remove obstacles to a future open-source Metaverse.
All organisations are welcome to the forum via a Participating Agreement, where they can join prototyping, plugfests, open-source tooling, hackathons, and other activities from July this year.
The Metaverse Standards Forum has been formed to foster development of open standards to build the open metaverse. Founding members include 10 standard organizations and 25+ top tech companies. Come join us!https://t.co/PRZRDlKMLD#metaverse #standards #opensource
— Metaverse Standards Forum (@Metaverse_Forum) June 21, 2022
The Forum consists of over ten standards organisations and 25 corporations as founding members, which include Adobe, Alibaba, Epic Games, Cesium, Huawei Technologies, IKEA, Khronos, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAR Cloud, the Open Geospatial Consortium, Avataar, Qualcomm Technologies, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Unity Technologies, the Web3D Consortium, the World Wide Web Consortium, and the XR Association (XRA), among many others.
The news comes as global entities prepare to design, test, and deploy the Metaverse, a merger of the Internet with spatial computing, which features and incorporates rising technologies such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (VR/AR/MR), digital twins, real-time 3D content, and others.
Other technologies included in the Forum’s activities include human-computer interfacing (HCI), avatar development, content creation, finance technologies, privacy and additional tools.
Khronos President Neil Trevett said that the Metaverse would unite “diverse technologies” which would require “a constellation of interoperability standards” built and maintained by SDOs.
He continued, stating,
“The Metaverse Standards Forum is a unique venue for coordination between standards organizations and industry, with a mission to foster the pragmatic and timely standardization that will be essential to an open and inclusive metaverse”
Comments on the Metaverse Standards Forum
Stefano Corazza, Vice-President and Fellow of AR at Adobe, said his firm was “excited” to join the Forum, adding it was in his company’s history to continue to the industry’s development with foundational standards similar to PDF and DNG files.
He concluded that establishing interoperability was “essential to foster collaboration in the Metaverse, and to allow this new ecosystem to truly flourish.”
According to Epic Games’ Vice-President of Unreal Engine, Marc Petit, his enterprise’s goal was to build an open metaverse that “enriches humanity and is home to a thriving, fair ecosystem.”
Huawei’s VP of Corporate Strategy and Industry Development, Xiao Ran, added that Huawei was pleased to join the Forum and believed the metaverse industry and ecosystem would “benefit from the collaborative actions and open standards.”
Meta’s Vishal Shah, Vice-President of Metaverse, said that efforts on standards would “require an industry-wide focus.”
He concluded,
“The [Forum] can drive the collaboration that’s needed to make this possible, and Meta is committed to this work. Creators, developers and companies will all benefit from the technologies and experiences that will be made possible by common protocols”
The news comes as firms such as Croquet Corporation, rooom, Exploded View, and Ready Player Me discussed the potential of the Metaverse under an open framework, allowing developers greater access to integrated developer environments (IDEs), world-building tools, and interoperable virtual worlds.
The Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has also begun exploring the potential of standards-based Web3 technologies and platforms, where companies and organisations can collaborate on developing the future successor to the World Wide Web (www) while reducing duplicated efforts.
