Active Domain Groups

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 Asset Interoperability using USD and glTF
Working for alignment and cooperation between USD and glTF file formats to increase synergy and reduce duplication of effort, gaps, fragmentation, and industry confusion. The Working Group is first collecting metaverse use cases for real-time 3D asset interoperability, such as authoring, delivery, and hybrid/integrated experiences, including end-user-created 3D content, individual assets, and scene containers of assets. The group is also exploring requirements for expanding the scope of 3D asset definitions from geometry and materials to behaviors, sound, physics, and composition, etc. From there, the group will review the current capabilities of USD and glTF to meet these use cases and make recommendations for cooperation. The group also plans interoperability testing to analyze and exercise this work. See Working Group Charter.

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. See Working Group Charter.

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. See Working Group Charter.

End-User Technical Troubleshooting
To provide guidance to the industry to help enable a proper troubleshooting in case of errors, identifying the source. This Group will also provide a testbed (including possibly referencing existing requirements/tests) in order to confirm that devices support a common set of features, so that end users can enjoy consistent experiences no matter what brand of device they own. The quality of the graphics/audio might be scaled to device capabilities, but the experience should be usable without manual user intervention. See Working Group Charter.

Network Requirements and Capabilities
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. See Working Group Charter.

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. See Working Group Charter.

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. See Working Group Charter.

Metaverse 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. See Working Group Charter.

Approved Exploratory Groups

Digital Fashion Wearables for Avatars
Generate insights and interoperability on Digital Fashion including clothing (with a layering system), shoes, hats, and accessories. The group is surveying the current landscape of existing file formats for storing avatars and related assets, generating use cases and requirements for avatar customisation, and defining logic for a wearables system including dress up, dress down, and replace options. The group is also considering developing an open source avatar validation tool for reliable import and export from popular authoring tools such as Blender.