Meta, Microsoft, Epic, Unity and IKEA, among others, form the Metaverse Standards Forum
A coalition of 36 tech companies founded the Metaverse Standards Forum. Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Epic Games and Sony, among others, have joined. The purpose of the forum is to investigate how the work of standards organizations can be accelerated.
It Metaverse Standards Forum is not itself a standards organization, highlights it in a faq. The forum says it wants to bring together companies and standards organizations 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 “hands-on interoperability projects” such as hackathons, plugfests and making open source toolkits available. 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 become a participant 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 wish to contribute to the funding and oversight of projects.
Metaverse
Various large tech companies see the metaverse as the ‘successor of the internet’. In particular, Meta, formerly Facebook, is betting big on the concept with billions of investments. The metaverse is a collective name 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.