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...it is important to establish guidelines that will help drive open interoperability and collaboration. To this end, leaders in the industry have formed the Metaverse Standards Forum, a newly established governing body, to ensure this journey is as problem-free as...

No one will agree on what the metaverse is. But that’s not stopping a coalition of big names in tech from designing the tools needed to build it.

The Metaverse Standards Forum launched to foster discussions on interoperability standards. The big names involved include Meta, formerly known as Facebook, which has bet its future on metaverse technology, and Epic Games, which has built a popular proto-metaverse with its “Fortnite” game.

Big-name tech companies such as Meta, Microsoft, and Epic Games have formed a standards organization called the Metaverse Standards Forum (MSF). This is meant to be a group that creates open standards for all things metaverse, including virtual reality, augmented reality, and 3D technology.

Metaverse Standards Forum launched, promising to facilitate discussions on open standards for the metaverse.

Metaverse standards are coming to life with the new Metaverse Standards Forum driving industry-wide cooperation on metaverse interoperability

The metaverse is seen as a borderless 3D world, and an alternate universe in which our digital avatars can live, work and play. Now major tech companies are joining hands in shaping that universe to ensure it doesn’t turn into a virtual Wild West.

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.

Khronos Group, the consortium behind the OpenXR standard, is helping to assemble other XR industry players in service of cooperatively building interoperability standards for what it hopes will be an “open and inclusive metaverse.”

Interoperability — or lack thereof — is a key issue in the nascent metaverse industry. The Khronos Group aims to solve this with a new open standards discussion forum called The Metaverse Standards Forum, which launches today. The group includes representation from most of the big players in the 3D internet, including Nvidia, Meta, Epic Games, Unity, Microsoft, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

The Metaverse Standards Forum is announcing that it will attempt to create standards for industries to create an open, interoperable, and inclusive metaverse.

I had a chance to speak with President of The Khronos Group Neil Trevett as well as Vice President of the Khronos Group Martin Enthed, who also works as an Innovation Manager at IKEA. We unpack this announcement a bit to talk about at what level of interoperability the Metaverse Standards Forum will be starting at, and whether it’s at the level of 3D assets like glTF or at the level of game engine formats and scene graph representations like USD.