Metaverse Standards Forum was formed in June 2022 with 37 founding member companies and now has over 1500 members.
Metaverse Standards Forum comprises vendors, standards development organizations and industry associations and aims to cooperate and coordinate on building a pervasive, open, and inclusive metaverse at global scale.
The Forum has a unique opportunity to create widespread visibility, and drive cooperation on metaverse standards with meaningful participation that can make a significant difference in the industry. The Forum is following a multi-step process to identify which metaverse topics the membership wishes to focus on via the Forum’s online portal and tools, to organize those topics into domains, and then establish working groups to execute projects focused on solving interoperability issues in those domains.
A wide diversity of over 200 topics were suggested by the Forum membership ranging from avatar animations, decentralized user ID, cross-blockchain interoperability, physics simulation, interactive behaviours, standardized protocols for Visual Positioning Services and ethical standards for the metaverse. These topics were then grouped into domains, and Forum members voted for the domains they felt would have the most industry impact.
So far, the most voted-for domains among the Metaverse Standards Forum include Interoperable 3D Assets, Privacy, Safety, Security, Inclusion, User Identity, Avatars and Apparel, Real/Virtual World Integration and Geospatial, Teaching and Education, Payments and Economy, XR and UI.
The next step in the process is to form Domain Working Groups to generate and execute specific project proposals. These Domain Working Groups will elect chairs from the membership and focus on executing project work products such as guidelines and recommendations, pilot projects, open-source tooling, plugfest data, and generating use case and requirement data to pass on to SDOs.
Over the coming months the Forum will establish a pipeline of Domain Working Groups with active projects beginning to take form.
In July, the Forum formed its first pilot working group to create a Metaverse Standards Register, as a comprehensive, interactive database of SDOs and standards activities that are relevant to the metaverse. This work is actively in progress and once completed, will be made openly available to enable anyone to navigate the landscape of metaverse more easily.
If you are not already a member, now is a great time for any company or organization with an interest in the metaverse to join the forum and get involved in engaging with the diverse membership on requirements and opportunities for metaverse and leverage the broad cooperation at the Forum.
