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This Residential Systems article takes a look at the Metaverse panel at CES 2023 diving into the potential possibilities and pitfalls of the current state of the Metaverse.

While Trevett cautioned business leaders to avoid getting caught in the metaverse hype, he said they must prepare now for it. “It will just gradually creep into our lives,” he said. “People really need to be attuned to what opportunities are being created.”

There’s still lots of work to do here, but groups like Khronos Group, the Realtime Conference, and Metaverse Standards Forum are bringing together tech companies, hardware makers, and retailers to work on open standards that will begin to govern metaverse content.

In this episode of the Step into the Metaverse Podcast, Dr Mark van Rijmenam chats with Neil Trevett, the Vice President of Developer Ecosystems at NVIDIA and chair of the Metaverse Standards Forum. Neil will talk about a constellation of standards necessary to have a truly interconnected metaverse or an interoperable metaverse.

In a recent article for The Economist, Tim Cross describes that after desktop computing, the consumer internet and the smartphone boom, the consumer-computing industry is past due its Next Big Thing. The coming year will see big tech firms doubling down on two related, much-hyped possibilities. One is VR and AR headsets; the other is the metaverse, which holds that an internet which is still largely flat—based on two-dimensional text, images and video—is ripe for replacement with one that is three-dimensional and immersive, experienced as a sort of globe-spanning video game.

IDTechEx gives three predictions for the metaverse in 2023. 2022 marked the formation of the Metaverse Standards Forum with its members list reading like a who’s-who of the XR industry, as well as major internet, telecoms, and professional service firms. 2023 will almost certainly see the first implementation of conclusions from the group in shaping this nascent space.

The metaverse is envisioned by many as the next generation of the internet, a vast, unfettered 3D network of virtual and augmented spaces where people can engage in all the activities they do online — work, play, learn, explore — but in ways that feel more like real life. For this to happen, many layers of technology standards and protocols will need to be established and adopted by metaverse platforms. Enter the Metaverse Standards Forum (MSF)…

One of the major goals of the MSF is to create an open and inclusive metaverse. At present, we understand the metaverse in a very company-specific way. For instance, we know that Nvidia, one of the founding members of the MSF, has a metaverse for engineers called Omniverse, and the gaming platform Roblox is a metaverse in itself. However, the metaverse isn’t meant to be individual virtual spaces “owned” by a particular company where one cannot communicate with another. It is eventually supposed to be everyone’s, in the sense that all virtual worlds are interconnected.

The Metaverse Standards Forum has its work cut out for it, says Matt White, one of its representatives. “The concept of the Metaverse is that it can’t be centralised, can’t be under one platform,” he says. “It is a paradigm shift around ownership and identity that needs to be addressed.”

In June, the Khronos Group established the Metaverse Standards Forum. The impetus, explained Khronos president Neil Trevett, was the widespread confusion around standards. Organizations were basically coming to Khronos for guidance and saying, “standards community, get yourselves sorted out,” he said.

“Looking ahead, we aim to develop experiences for customers beyond AEC industries, including M&E and manufacturing, bringing forth the value of real-time content creation. As members of the Metaverse Standards Forum, Epic Games and Autodesk are also driving open standards that enhance portability and integration, equip customers with immersive and collaborative technology, and deliver real value for customers.”