Metaverse Standards Forum Announced, Meta and Microsoft Amongst Founding Members

An oversight group for the growing world of metaverse has been formed by the likes of Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA and more. Called ‘The Metaverse Standards Forum’, this group brings together the leading standards organisations and companies for industry-wide cooperation on interoperability standards needed to build the open metaverse.

The newly formed The Metaverse Standards Forum will be open to any organisation at zero cost. “The Forum will focus on pragmatic, action-based projects such as implementation prototyping, hackathons, plugfests, and open-source tooling to accelerate the testing and adoption of metaverse standards, while also developing consistent terminology and deployment guidelines”, said the group in a statement.

Announced on 21 June, The Forum was established by founding members that include 0xSenses, Academy Software Foundation, Adobe, Alibaba, Autodesk, Avataar, Blackshark.ai, CalConnect, Cesium, Daly Realism, Disguise, the Enosema Foundation, Epic Games, the Express Language Foundation, Huawei, IKEA, John Peddie Research, Khronos, Lamina1, Maxon, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAR Cloud, the Open Geospatial Consortium, Otoy, Perey Research and Consulting, Qualcomm Technologies, Ribose, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Spatial Web Foundation, Unity, VerseMaker, Wayfair, the Web3D Consortium, the World Wide Web Consortium, and the XR Association (XRA).

These organisations will explore where the lack of interoperability is holding back metaverse deployment and how the work of Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) defining and evolving needed standards may be coordinated and accelerated.

“Building a metaverse for everyone will require an industry-wide focus on common standards. The Metaverse Standards Forum can drive the collaboration that’s needed to make this possible, and Meta is committed to this work. Creators, developers and companies will all benefit from the technologies and experiences that will be made possible by common protocols”, said Vishal Shah, vice president of Metaverse at Meta.

The Metaverse Standards Forum is hosted by the Khronos Group and will be open to any company, standard organization or university through a simple click-through Participant Agreement. Companies that wish to provide Forum oversight, and may wish to fund Forum projects, can choose to become a Principal member.