Organizations and Companies Unite on Open Metaverse Interoperability

Tech giants like Meta, Huawei, and Qualcomm, jointly launched the Metaverse Standards Forum to develop industry guidelines ensuring immersive VR worlds are compatible. It will explore how the coordination and implementation of interoperability standards could deliver an open and inclusive metaverse.

The metaverse is motivating the novel integration and deployment of diverse technologies for collaborative spatial computing, such as interactive 3D graphics, AR and VR, photorealistic content authoring, geospatial systems, end-user content tooling, digital twins, real-time collaboration, physical simulation, online economies, multi-user gaming, and more - at new levels of scale and immersiveness. Multiple industry leaders have stated that the potential of the metaverse will be best realized if it is built on a foundation of open standards.

Building an open and inclusive metaverse at a pervasive scale will demand a constellation of open interoperability standards created by SDOs such as The Khronos Group, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Open Geospatial Consortium, the Open AR Cloud, the Spatial Web Foundation, and many others. The Forum aims to foster consensus-based cooperation between diverse SDOs and companies to define and align requirements and priorities for metaverse standards—accelerating their availability and reducing duplication of effort across the industry.

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

The activities of the Forum will be directed by the needs and interests of its members and may involve diverse technology domains. So far, the most recognized technologies that can be used to build metaverse are 3D assets and rendering, human interface and interaction paradigms such as AR and VR, user-created content, avatars, identity management, privacy, and financial transactions.

“The Academy Software Foundation is pleased to join the Metaverse Standard Forum as a Founding member because open-source software developed by motion picture industry engineers can contribute building blocks for the Metaverse,“ said David Morin, executive director of Academy Software Foundation (ASWF). “When it comes to building strange new worlds and boldly go where no one has gone before, count us in.“