The Metaverse Standards Forum is working to create a range of open standards to accelerate adoption of metaverse technologies.
Industry interest in the metaverse flows from opportunities created by combining multiple disruptive technologies such as GPU-powered real-time photorealistic graphics and physical simulation, augmented and virtual reality, decentralised trust-and-storage, and artificial Intelligence. An unprecedented level of interoperability will be needed for these technologies to work together, necessitating a range of open standards created by dozens of Standards Developing Organisations (SDOs).
The Metaverse Standards Forum is enabling industry coordination that is generating insights into the metaverse landscape including what interoperability standards will have the greatest impact, and what business opportunities they will create.
The Forum is enabling diverse SDOs to gather input, share progress, and cooperate with industry to identify needs and next steps to encourage, influence, and accelerate the evolution of effective, timely, open standards. Over 2,100 leading companies and SDOs have joined the Forum, providing a unique opportunity for widespread visibility, coordination and alignment on metaverse standards.
To ensure its activities are grounded in real industry needs, and that all voices and opinions are considered, the Forum has created a four-step Domain Group Pipeline process to gather input from the Forum membership on interoperability topics that present the biggest obstacles to an open metaverse, or offer the most significant opportunities for standardisation to build business opportunities. In the first round, a broad spectrum of over 200 Topics were suggested, covering everything from technical interoperability of standardized API and formats, to metaverse ethics, privacy and education.
So far there are over twenty priority Domains with privacy/safety, 3D asset interoperability and real/virtual world integration being voted to the top three spots.
Any Forum member may propose Exploratory Groups to address interoperability topics in the Domains with the highest member interest. If approved, each Group is tasked with building consensus on what pragmatic projects and activities can best progress interoperability in a particular Domain, and capturing those insights in a draft Working Group Charter. The Forum encourages Charters that identify pragmatic projects with short-term deliverables that drive well-defined interoperability benefits.
Approved Working Groups execute the projects and activities in their Charter, making any deliverables publicly and openly available. Forum Working Groups prioritise projects that produce concrete outputs, including guidelines and recommendations, open-source tooling, interoperability testing results, and use case/requirement documents to assist and foster relevant SDOs in their mission to create and evolve widely adopted metaverse-relevant standards.
Forum Exploratory and Working Groups include Metaverse Standards Register, 3D Asset Interoperability using USD and glTF, Digital Fashion Wearables for Avatars, Digital Asset Management, Real/Virtual World Integration, and Privacy, Cybersecurity & Identity
