The Metaverse Standards Forum maintains a pipeline of member-driven Exploratory and Working Groups to address interoperability challenges and opportunities in multiple Domains that are vital to the metaverse. These Domain Groups meet regularly to build consensus on their Charters and then execute the projects they define. Any Forum member is welcome to initiate, participate in, and stand for election to lead Forum Exploratory and Working Groups
Approved Working Groups
3D Assets Working Group focuses on facilitating the industry-wide transition from today’s predominantly 2D digital content to a future where 3D becomes the default medium for users. This migration introduces a set of challenges involving diverse rendering engines and formats, heterogeneous devices and hardware, spatial interaction models, and new considerations for performance, visual fidelity and interoperability.
3D Web Interoperability
The mission of the 3D Web Interoperability Working Group is to enable metaverse capabilities and content to be deployed on the web through informing and encouraging the web standards ecosystem to evolve to support metaverse use cases and for the web to support and leverage broader metaverse interoperability initiatives.
Accessibility in the Metaverse
The “Accessibility in the Metaverse” working group would be dedicated to securing accessibility for everyone in the metaverse. Our goal is to generate insights, identify risks, and recommend strategies and best practices to ensure that virtual environments, experiences, and interactions are accessible to all, regardless of abilities or disabilities. The group will also explore the accessibility needs of metaverse content creators and developers in addition to end users and how accessible experiences benefit the organizations creating them. By promoting accessibility, we can achieve interoperability and full participation across metaverse experiences for everyone. Non-goals include developing specific technical solutions or products.
AI x Metaverse
The AI in the Metaverse Exploratory Group will serve as a coordination hub among standards development organizations (SDOs) focused on metaverse AI, while recruiting experts and companies to join the Metaverse Standards Forum (MSF). It will survey existing standards, produce a gap analysis with use cases, and initiate projects not addressed elsewhere—such as AI agents. The group will highlight SDO efforts, make recommendations, plan AI-related events, and define AI interoperability categories. It will also propose best practices for AI in MSF operations and maintain a regular meeting cadence. As an exploratory body, it will recruit leadership, develop a vision statement, coordinate with SDOs on outreach, and manage operational needs—without defining standards, datasets, or platform-specific implementations.
Digital Asset Management
Exploring the standards landscape relating to the protection of digital rights, portability, access, availability, and other areas impacting the management of digital virtual assets. The group is aiming to establish guiding principles that would address the transport, exchange, monetization, and access related to 3D digital assets throughout the metaverse stack.
Education
Education and training in the Metaverse are becoming essential for all organizations, whether for internal skill development or external educational offerings. By compiling information from diverse sources, this register will serve to inform stakeholders about the current landscape of Metaverse education and potentially streamline their approaches by collating best practices, challenges, and emerging trends. It is important to note that “education and training in the Metaverse” would refer to both teaching within and about the Metaverse.
This group will start by recognising this variety of perspectives, and rather than adopting a prescriptive or normative position, will focus on a descriptive approach: the main aim will be to review and take stock of the different approaches that have been proposed as a basis for the ethical principles of the metaverse, to synthesize those principles that generate great consensus, as well as to identify those issues that prompt greater debate and stimulate reflection on them. Also, to identify different mechanisms for implementing these principles in organisations, and to issue recommendations around them.
Industrial Metaverse Interoperability
The industrial metaverse enables collaboration between geographically dispersed teams through virtual environments, expert avatars, digital twins, data visualization, AR/VR and the emerging concept of Shared Reality (SR)”. The Industrial metaverse is expected to be deployed at scale first, before the consumer market. The consumer market is mostly gaming-centric with willingness-to-pay, QoE and form-factors still requiring improvement for mass scale deployment and device proliferation. The industrial metaverse benefits from use-cases having immediate return on investments. While the consumer market is still awaiting a technological breakthrough, the industry and enterprise domains are closer to deployments at scale.
To collect use cases and related requirements for network capabilities to support metaverse applications, e.g. latency, jitter, throughput, time synchronization. Includes documenting applicable QoE metrics and defining requirements for network-to-network interfaces such as atomic clock synchronization from satellite to backbone to access network.
Privacy, Cybersecurity & Identity
Approved with very strong interest from the Forum members, the urgent priority of this group is to deliver recommendations for responsible innovation that mitigates human and societal harm from objective and subjective privacy risks – including privacy, cybersecurity, and identity risk management at the global level. The Working Group will curate standards, guidelines, policies, and technical frameworks for various metaverse-related use cases and across various jurisdictions.
Real/Virtual World Integration
Defining constructs to describe and integrate the physical world and created (digital) representations. The group is examining current technologies and standards around semantic representations, Unique Real-world Identifiers, OGC GeoPose 1.0, Digital Twins, IoT, WoT, and Sensor ontologies to understand and recommend technical methods to integrate created content with reality.
Standards Register
Building a publicly accessible database, or Register, of organizations, publications, projects and related to metaverse interoperability to enable navigation and analysis of the ecosystem of standardization activities relevant to building an open metaverse to identify connections and gaps. To ensure accuracy and relevance, data in the Register is provided and maintained by qualified standards-related organizations that are approved for Register upload access. Also creating a Metaverse Standards Glossary to enable the metaverse community to communicate clearly, concisely and consistently about components and concepts captured in the Register.
Approved Exploratory Groups
Build consensus and draft a proposed charter for a “Decentralized Web3 Services requirements and capabilities to support Metaverse applications” Domain Working Group
Facilitating discussion between ecosystem stakeholders for the purpose of identifying challenges and recommending solutions for XR device and experience interoperability to help accelerate the time-to-market, performance, and useability.