A new forum is bringing together tech giants and standards organisations to help develop an open and inclusive metaverse.
The goal of the Metaverse Standards Forum is to push open standards for metaverse development through pragmatic, action-based projects such as prototyping, hackathons, plugfests and open-source tooling. The forum said this will help accelerate the adoption of metaverse standards, while developing terminology and deployment guidelines.
The concept of the metaverse has been growing in popularity since Facebook changed its name to Meta last October and bet its future on developments in AI, AR and VR. Since then, there has been a lot of discussion around what it means for the future, including how this type of tech might affect recruitment and the working world.
Last November, a report by EmergenResearch said the market value for the metaverse was more than $47bn in 2020 and is expected to be worth nearly $829bn by 2028.
The forum’s founding members include some big names in tech that are looking to explore where the lack of interoperability is holding back metaverse deployment. These include Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Unity, Sony, Adobe, Huawei and many others.
“Building a metaverse for everyone will require an industry-wide focus on common standards,” said Vishal Shah, Meta VP of metaverse. “Creators, developers and companies will all benefit from the technologies and experiences that will be made possible by common protocols.”
However, there are some notable company names that are absent from the group, such as Apple and Niantic, which developed the augmented reality game Pokémon Go.
The forum will be directed the Khronos Group, a consortium of 170 organisations developing royalty-free standards in sectors such as VR, AR, parallel computation, vision acceleration and machine learning.
The forum is open to any company, standards organisation or university for free. Companies that wish to provide oversight or fund forum projects can choose to become a principal member.
The first meeting of the Metaverse Standards Forum is expected to take place in July. The forum’s activities will be directed by the needs and interests of its members and may involve areas such as user created content, avatars, identity management and privacy.
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