Open standards to accelerate the development of the metaverse will be the subject of discussion on a Zoom video call next month as members of the Metaverse Standards Forum meet for the first time.

The effort to “foster the development of open standards for the metaverse” is hosted by the Khronos Group and already joined by the likes of Microsoft, Meta, Google, Adobe, Epic Games, Unity, and NVIDIA among many others, and membership even includes other standards developing organizations such as W3C. The aim is to develop “consistent terminology and deployment guidelines” as well as “pragmatic, action-based projects…to accelerate the testing and adoption of metaverse standards.”

If that sounds kind of vague that’s because it is, with specific activities of the Metaverse Standards Forum still to be determined by its membership. The group’s membership is open and free to organizations at metaverse-standards.org, with the forum’s activities to be “directed by the needs and interests of its members and may involve diverse technology domains such as 3D assets and rendering, human interface and interaction paradigms such as AR and VR, user created content, avatars, identity management, privacy, and financial transactions,” according to a press release announcing the effort.

“NVIDIA understands the metaverse as an evolution of the Internet — from today’s 2D view of the web to an immersive 3D spatial overlay,” said Rev Lebaredian, vice president, Omniverse & Simulation Technology at NVIDIA, in a prepared statement. “For the metaverse to be successful and ubiquitous, it must be built on open standards, just like today’s 2D web — and our joining the Metaverse Standards Forum will help the community usher in a new era of collaborative and open 3D standards that will form the foundation of the metaverse.”

We’ve seen executives at companies like Microsoft and Meta use “metaverse” to describe their vision for mixed reality and embodied computing across an array of devices, but exactly how that’ll all operate remains unclear. Could the Metaverse Standards Forum be key to sharpening that vision and making the metaverse real? Time will tell of course, and we’ll follow The Metaverse Forum for updates.

Ian Hamilton

Ian Hamilton is a journalist based in Arkansas and managing editor at UploadVR. He's covered VR full-time since 2015 as well as Oculus VR since 2012. He is interested in the people creating VR and AR hardware and software, their motivations, and how that work affects the people who spend significant time in simulations. If you have information to pass along you can send him a direct message on Twitter, Facebook or via email.