“Building a metaverse for everyone will require an industry-wide focus on common standards. The Metaverse Standards Forum can drive the collaboration that’s needed to make this possible, and Meta is committed to this work," said Vishal Shah, vice president of metaverse at Meta.
"Creators, developers and companies will all benefit from the technologies and experiences that will be made possible by common protocols.”
The newly launched organisation will see its members cooperate on interoperability standards needed to build what it calls the open metaverse. Specifically, the group will explore where the lack of interoperability is restricting metaverse deployment and how the work of standards developing organisations (SDOs) are organised and accelerated.
“We are thrilled to join the Metaverse Standards Forum to help define standards for the metaverse to flourish with a healthy ecosystem and help creators pioneer innovative experiences that will lead the next generation of immersive technology,” said Hugo Swart, vice president and general manager of XR, Qualcomm Technologies.
The forum, hosted by Khronos Group, is free to join and open to any relevant organisation and will see the development of projects though such means as implementation prototyping, hackathons, plugfests, and open-source tooling.
“NVIDIA understands the metaverse as an evolution of the Internet — from today’s 2D view of the web to an immersive 3D spatial overlay,” said Rev Lebaredian, vice president of omniverse & simulation technology at NVIDIA.
“For the metaverse to be successful and ubiquitous, it must be built on open standards, just like today’s 2D web — and our joining the Metaverse Standards Forum will help the community usher in a new era of collaborative and open 3D standards that will form the foundation of the metaverse.”
The full list of members include: xSenses, Academy Software Foundation, Adobe, Alibaba, Autodesk, Avataar, Blackshark.ai, CalConnect, Cesium, Daly Realism, Disguise, the Enosema Foundation, Epic Games, the Express Language Foundation, Huawei, IKEA, John Peddie Research, Khronos, Lamina1, Maxon, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAR Cloud, the Open Geospatial Consortium, Otoy, Perey Research and Consulting, Qualcomm Technologies, Ribose, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Spatial Web Foundation, Unity, VerseMaker, Wayfair, the Web3D Consortium, the World Wide Web Consortium, and the XR Association.
“The metaverse will bring together diverse technologies, requiring a constellation of interoperability standards, created and maintained by many standards organisations,” said Neil Trevett, Khronos president.
“The Metaverse Standards Forum is a unique venue for coordination between standards organisations and industry, with a mission to foster the pragmatic and timely standardization that will be essential to an open and inclusive metaverse.”
