Meta, Microsoft, Epic, Unity and IKEA, among others, form Metaverse Standards Forum
A coalition of 36 tech companies has formed the Metaverse Standards Forum. Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Epic Games and Sony, among others, have joined. The aim of the forum is to investigate how the work of standards organizations can be accelerated.
It Metaverse Standards Forum is not a standards organization itself, emphasizes it in a faq† The forum says it wants to bring companies and standards organizations together and investigate whether a lack of interoperability hinders the development of the metaverse. The companies and organizations want to look together at how the work of existing standards organizations can be optimized and accelerated.
The focus of the forum will be on organizing ‘practical interoperability projects’, such as hackathons, plugfests and the provision of open source toolkits. A total of 36 companies are members of the Metaverse Standards Forum. These include Adobe, Autodesk, Epic Games, Huawei, IKEA, Khronos, Maxon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Sony, Unity, and W3C.
The Khronos Group hosts the Metaverse Standards Forum. The Khronos Group is a non-profit consortium led by 170 organizations developing royalty-free standards for 3D graphics, virtual reality and augmented reality. Khronos is known for Vulkan, WebGL and OpenGL, among others.
Companies and organizations can still register to participate in the Metaverse Standards Forum under certain conditions. This allows them to participate in discussions and projects of the forum. Organizations can also become part of the main organization if they want to contribute to the financing and supervision of projects.
metaverse
Several large tech companies see the metaverse as a ‘successor to the internet’. In particular, Meta, the former Facebook, is investing heavily in the concept with billions of dollars. The metaverse is a collective term for a virtual world in which users can walk around and perform all kinds of activities. The advent of advanced VR and AR glasses should improve their popularity and usability.