Interested parties in turning Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite buzzword into reality announced on Wednesday that they have formed The Metaverse Standards Forum. Meta is a founding member, of course, and big tech names like Adobe, Microsoft, and Nvidia are also founding members. However, initial membership does not involve Apple and Google.
The forum, according to today’s announcement, is intended to “encourage the development of open standards for metavers.”
“The Forum will explore where the lack of interoperability slows down the deployment of metavers and how the work of standards development organizations (SDOs) that define and evolve the necessary standards can be coordinated and accelerated,” the group said in your ad.
Other founding members include Adobe, Epic Games, Ikea, Qualcomm, Sony, the XR Association and the SDOs The Khronos Group, World Wide Web Consortium and Open Geospatial Consortium.
Apple, which is expected to launch an AR headset in 2023, is not involved. Neither does Alphabet, the owner of Google. Both sides have previously joined open industry groups such as Matter and FIDO, but neither has promoted the phrase “metavers”.
Beyond its unannounced (but hotly debated) AR headphones that are said to be in development, CEO Tim Cook said Apple’s role in the metavers market is “a big question” in the first earnings call Apple’s 2022 quarter in January.
“We’re always exploring new and emerging technologies … Right now, we have over 14,000 RA kit apps in the App Store, offering amazing RA experiences for millions of people today,” Cook said when asked. asked about Apple’s metaverse plans. to a Seeking Alpha transcript. “We see a lot of potential in this space and we are investing accordingly.”
Announcements
In the meantime, Alphabet Google has linked to a new AR headset. And RA is a promoted feature of a variety of Google products, from Pixel phones to software.
Google also joined the Virtual Reality Standards Initiative in 2016, as noted by TechCrunch, along with the then-branded Oculus VR brand Facebook. The initiative was led by The Kronos Group, an emerging technology-focused non-profit organization that also hosts The Metaverse Standards Forum.
The new group offers a free, open-ended subscription, so both companies could join the metavers forum later. But with so many questions around metavers (what it means and how it will be monetized and moderated), it’s no surprise that some big names in technology don’t feel like signing up. There is also the fact that Meta is inflexible when it comes to using a term that is synonymous with its own brand.
These organizations will miss out on “action-based pragmatic projects,” such as “implementation prototypes, hackathons, plugfests, and open source tools to accelerate testing and adoption of metaverse standards,” according to the forum announcement . The group also said it will work to develop “consistent terminology and deployment guidelines.”
The focus of the group will vary depending on the membership, but the potential issues raised are “assets and 3D rendering, human interface and interaction paradigms such as AR and VR, user-created content, avatars, identities, privacy and financial transactions “.
The Metaverse Standards Forum also highlighted potential areas of collaborative space computing, such as AR and VR, of course, but also “authoring photorealistic content, geospatial systems, end-user content tools, digital twins, real-time collaboration, physical simulation, online economics “. , “and more.
The forum is scheduled to hold its first meeting in July.