The Metaverse Standards Forum becomes official, unifying the virtual
posted Sunday Apr 23, 2023 by Scott Ertz
Before the topic du jour changed to generative AI, the popular topic in the tech world was the Metaverse. Just like with the AI world, when something becomes incredibly popular, every company wants to get involved because they think it's going to be the next big game changer. Unfortunately, a lot of time and effort are wasted in these pursuits, partially because everyone is trying to duplicate processes. The Metaverse Standards Forum is here to help companies prevent duplicated efforts, and to create a way for different systems to interact and cooperate with one another.
What is the Metaverse Standards Forum?
The Metaverse Standards Forum is an organization dedicated to creating uniform standards for communication, validation, and interoperability between different virtual reality systems. The forum is composed of companies representing many industries, including entertainment, enterprise, healthcare, and education. This collective pool of knowledge is used to create open standards that enable different platforms to work together without the need for third-party integrations or custom APIs.
The ultimate goal of the Metaverse Standards Forum is to create a universal language for virtual reality that allows multiple platforms to easily interact with one another in a secure, efficient way. This will allow developers and companies to innovate faster within their own areas of expertise, without having to expend resources on integration and interoperability solutions.
The Metaverse Standards Forum is also committed to helping drive the creation of new industry standards and best practices for virtual reality. Our members are constantly sharing their knowledge with one another, as well as collaborating on projects that focus on creating virtual reality experiences that are more immersive and enjoyable for end users. Their goal is to ensure that everyone has access to the same level of quality.
The future of the Forum
Until now, the Metaverse Standards Forum was a loose affiliation of organizations working towards a common goal. It has been incubated under the Khronos Group, with the intention of going independent. This week, however, it was announced that the Forum was officially incorporated as a non-profit member-based organization. This official status gives the organization a lot more flexibility in creating and managing standards, as well as official standing to be able to petition companies, organizations, and governments to uphold their standards.
Neil Trevett, President of the Khronos Group as well as first President of the Metaverse Standards Forum, said in a statement,
Interoperability is the key to the metaverse scaling to its full potential beyond siloed games, experiences, and worlds, and the unprecedented level of participation in the forum demonstrates strong industry interest in the broad cooperation necessary to bring that vision to life.
A unifying standards body is something that has been sorely lacking in the Metaverse space. With Facebook/Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Apple all in the space, you knew for sure there were going to be a lot of incompatible VR systems. With the official introduction of the standards board, consumers will be protected from getting locked into an ecosystem because of an initial investment in one company's products and services.
