The newly created Metaverse Standards Forum brings together leading standards organizations and companies for industry-wide cooperation on interoperability standards needed to build the open metaverse.

Hosted by the Khronos Group, the Forum is open to any company, standards organization, or university at no charge through a simple click-through Participant Agreement. Companies that wish to provide Forum oversight, and may wish to fund Forum projects, can choose to become a Principal member.

“The metaverse will bring together diverse technologies, requiring a constellation of interoperability standards, created and maintained by many standards organizations,” said Neil Trevett, Khronos president. “The Metaverse Standards Forum is a unique venue for coordination between standards organizations and industry, with a mission to foster the pragmatic and timely standardization that will be essential to an open and inclusive metaverse.”

The Forum will explore where the lack of interoperability is holding back metaverse deployment and how the work of Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) defining and evolving needed standards may be coordinated and accelerated. Open to any organization at no cost, the Forum will focus on pragmatic, action-based projects such as implementation prototyping, hackathons, plugfests, and open-source tooling to accelerate the testing and adoption of metaverse standards, while also developing consistent terminology and deployment guidelines.

Multiple industry leaders have stated that the potential of the metaverse will be best realized if it is built on a foundation of open standards. Building an open and inclusive metaverse at pervasive scale will demand a constellation of open interoperability standards created by SDOs such as The Khronos Group, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Open Geospatial Consortium, the Open AR Cloud, the Spatial Web Foundation, and many others. The Metaverse Standards Forum aims to foster consensus-based cooperation between diverse SDOs and companies to define and align requirements and priorities for metaverse standards—accelerating their availability and reducing duplication of effort across the industry.

“XR Association is pleased to be part of this prestigious collaborative effort to design the XR standards framework,” said Stephanie Montgomery, vice president of Research and Best Practices at XRA. “Our mission is the responsible development and advancement of XR. Through the Metaverse Standards Forum we will contribute to common protocols, interoperability and shared understanding, thereby responsibly improving technological efficiencies and advancing XR technology to new levels of delight.”

The activities of the Forum will be directed by the needs and interests of its members and may involve diverse technology domains such as 3D assets and rendering, human interface and interaction paradigms such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), user created content, avatars, identity management, privacy, and financial transactions. Forum meetings are expected to start in July 2022. More information on joining can be found at metaverse-standards.org.