Standards Forum Meets in July to Plan Metaverse Interoperability

Open standards for accelerating metaverse development will be discussed in a Zoom video call next month as members of the Metaverse Standards Forum meet for the first time.

The effort to “foster the development of open standards for the metaverse” is hosted by the Khronos Group and already joined by Microsoft, Meta, Google, Adobe, Epic Games, Unity, and NVIDIA among many others, and membership includes even other standards development organizations such as the W3C. The goal is to develop “consistent terminology and deployment guidelines” as well as “pragmatic, action-based projects…to accelerate testing and adoption of metaverse standards.”

If that sounds a little vague, that’s because it is, with the specific activities of the Metaverse Standards Forum still to be determined by its members. Group membership is open and free to organizations on metaverse-standards.org, with forum activities to be “driven by the needs and interests of its members and may involve various technology areas such as 3D assets and rendering, human interface and interaction paradigms such as AR and VR, user-created content, avatars, identity management, privacy and financial transactions,” according to a press release announcing the effort.

“NVIDIA understands the Metaverse as an evolution of the Internet – from the current 2D view of the Web to an immersive 3D spatial overlay,” said Rev Lebaredian, Vice President, Omniverse & Simulation Technology at NVIDIA, in a prepared statement. “For the Metaverse to be successful and ubiquitous, it must be built on open standards, just like today’s 2D Web – and our membership in the Metaverse Standards Forum will help the community usher in a new era of collaborative 3D standards and that will form the foundation of the metaverse.

We’ve seen executives from companies like Microsoft and Meta use the “metaverse” to describe their vision of mixed reality and embodied computing across a range of devices, but exactly how it will all work remains unclear. Could the Metaverse Standards Forum be the key to refining this vision and making the Metaverse real? Time will tell of course, and we will follow The Metaverse Forum for updates.