Technology

Metaverse Standards Forum aims for open interoperability

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July 18, 2022

Over two dozen companies, including retailers Wayfair and Ikea, are part of the Metaverse Standards Forum, a group aimed at the development of open standards and driving interoperability.

The founding membership roster includes 0xSenses, 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, Jon 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.

Membership is open to any organization, university and company at no cost, according to a press release. The forum will explore where the lack of interoperability is restricting metaverse deployment and focus on action-based projects such as implementation prototyping, hackathons, plugfests and open-source tooling to accelerate the testing and adoption of metaverse standards, while also developing consistent terminology and deployment guidelines.

The metaverse is driving integration and deployment of diverse technologies for collaborative spatial computing such as interactive 3D graphics, augmented and virtual reality, photorealistic content authoring, geospatial systems end-user content tooling, digital twins, real-time collaboration, physical simulation, online economies, multi-user gaming and more.

"The metaverse will bring together diverse technologies, requiring a constellation of interoperability standards, created and maintained by many standards organizations," Neil Trevett, Khronos president, said in the release. "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."

"Ikea is looking forward to this Metaverse Standards Forum as we believe that the way to democratize metaverse and spatial computing is to have many open standards that work well together," Martin Enthed, innovation manager at Ikea marketing and communication AB, said in the release. "This forum we hope will be a place where that coordination could happen between SDOs, industry and where Ikea can contribute with the use cases and experiences from our industry."