The Metaverse Standards Forum: What you need to know

With so many standards organizations in this domain already, it is easy to wonder if the establishment of another standards group just adds to the confusion. But IT executives hope that the new effort will consolidate existing work and suggest areas for further harmonization.

“Whether you subscribe to a single metaverse or multiverse model, users will require interoperability to see value in the metaverse,” said Kevin Collins, managing director at Accenture.

Interoperability is needed for platforms to interact with each other, Collins explained, and for users to easily cross between platforms while carrying their identity, assets and communications with them. He believes the Metaverse Standards Forum’s efforts will encourage and coordinate the development and adoption of the standards necessary to ensure the creation of a connected and consistent metaverse.

The MSF has itself emphasized that it intends to coordinate the requirements and resources of other standards organizations rather than create new standards. To that end, it is working with a variety of standards organizations in related domains, including the Khronos Group, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Open Geospatial Consortium, Open AR Cloud, Spatial Web Foundation and many others.

This coordination will help participants think through the kinds of standards required for consumer and enterprise use cases, said Frank Palermo, executive vice president and head of technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) at Virtusa, a digital engineering consultancy.

“Having some cooperating bodies to think through standards is important. Otherwise, various companies will build their own variation of the metaverse across a wide variety of technologies that may not easily interoperate,” Palermo said.