Metaverse has become the trending topic these days. From a new fashion store boasting of big brands to the various updates the company keeps bringing to cater to its vast audience, Meta is always successful in staying in the news.
Although these conversations have created a lot of hype around the product, there still needs to be unified standards around the app. This is probably the direction a lot of tech companies have decided to take as well. Microsoft, Epic Games, Meta, and 33 other companies have come together to set up an open standards group for Metaverse, called the Metaverse Standards Forums.
The forum promises to promote and monitor the standards of augmented reality technology. It brings together leading standard organizations and companies for industry-wide cooperation on interoperability standards, which are extremely important in building the open metaverse. The forum also talks about exploring where the lack of interoperability is holding back the metaverse deployment.
“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,”
Neil Trevett, Khronos President.
The forum is pretty clear in its focus on pragmatic, action-based projects such as implementation prototyping, hackathons, plugfests, and open-source tooling to accelerate the testing. Other founding members of the forum are the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Nvidia, Qualcomm, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Khronos, and Lamina1 among many others.
There are still some expected names missing, as there is no sign of Apple on the list. Experts believe them to be busy with creating their own AR & VR technology. Companies such as Niantic and Roblox who have been pioneers in the world of video games and virtual worlds also seem to be missing. The forum is expected to schedule its first meeting in July of this year, as they are waiting for more members to come on board.
VR, AR, and all the other virtual worlds can be grouped under one term, Metaverse. Multiple standards organizations already exist for different sub-fields and have even become a part of the new forum. Open standards will make it simpler for the developers to create the same content for several platforms or consumers. This will also help in exporting the data from one service to another.