Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia aim to standardize the metaverse

Parties interested in turning Metaverse CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite buzzword into reality announced Wednesday the formation of the Metaverse Standards Forum. Meta is naturally a founding member, and major tech companies such as Adobe, Microsoft, and Nvidia are founding members as well. However, the initial membership clearly lacks the involvement of Apple and Google.

The forum, according to today’s announcement, is intended to “promote the development of open standards for the metaverse.”

“The forum will look at where lack of interoperability is holding back the deployment of the metaverse, and how standards development organizations (SDOs) can be coordinated and accelerated to define and develop the necessary standards,”the group said in a statement.

Other founding members are Adobe, Epic Games, Ikea, Qualcomm, Sony, XR Association and SDO The Khronos Group, the World Wide Web Consortium and the Open Geospatial Consortium.

Apple, which is expected to release an AR headset by 2023, is not involved. So is Alphabet, which owns Google. Both parties have previously joined open industry groups, including Matter and FIDO, but neither promoted the phrase “metaverse.”

Aside from an unannounced (but widely discussed) AR headset reportedly in development, CEO Tim Cook said Apple’s role in the metaverse market is a “big question”in Apple’s Q1 2022 earnings report in January.

“We’re always exploring new and emerging technologies… We now have over 14,000 augmented reality apps in the App Store that are bringing incredible augmented reality experiences to millions of people today,” Cook said when asked about Apple’s plans for the Metaverse. to Seeking Alpha transcript. “We see great potential in this space and are investing accordingly.”

Meanwhile, Alphabet Google has been linked with a new AR headset of its own. And AR is a touted feature of various Google products, from Pixel phones to software.

Google also joined the Virtual Reality Standards Initiative in 2016, as noted by TechCrunch, along with then-branded Facebook and Oculus VR. The initiative was led by the Kronos Group, a non-profit organization focused on emerging technologies that also hosts the Metaverse Standards Forum.

The new group provides free open membership so both companies can join the metaverse forum in the future. But with so many questions surrounding the metaverse — what does that mean and how will it be monetized and moderated — we’re not surprised that some big names in tech are reluctant to register. There’s also the fact that Meta is adamant about using the term, which is synonymous with its own brand.

These organizations will miss out on “pragmatic, action-based projects”such as “implementation prototyping, hackathons, plugins, and open source tools to accelerate testing and adoption of metaverse standards,”according to a forum announcement. The group also said it would work towards “harmonized terminology and deployment guidelines”.

The group’s focus will vary by membership, but possible topics are “3D assets and rendering, human interface and interaction paradigms such as AR and VR, user-generated content, avatars, identity management, privacy and financial transactions.”

The Metaverse Standards Forum also highlighted potential areas of collaborative spatial computing, including, of course, AR and VR, as well as “photorealistic content authorization, geospatial systems, end user tools, digital twins, real-time collaboration, physical simulation, online economy.”and more.

The Forum plans to hold its first meeting in July.