What Metaverse Standards Forum Means For the Space The first step for metaverse standardization has been taken. The road to metaverse is done but what lies ahead?

Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Unity, Epic Games, Sony and others have joined hands to build a Metaverse Standards Forum that aims to drive interoperability. This would directly result in making it easier for developers to build across platforms. 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.

"I think metaverse like Sandbox and Decentraland promote a more open culture like people having options and people having the ability to build in these spaces. I actually don't think that the standardization would be very applicable until more metaverse companies collaborate to it. Unless it is a metaverse council of existing metaverse players and other big players, I don't really see this as a real standardization. The kind of audience meta has on its social content can encourage first time users which would be a good thing," said Supreet Raju, co-founder, OneRare.

The Web3 revolution has taken the world by storm as technology keeps on evolving. The Web3 revolution is enabling technologies like cryptocurrency, blockchain, NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and metaverse to exist and flourish. Metaverse have become a space of interest for many brands. Augmented reality and virtual reality have come to the fore as people are keen to try a more immersive experience. A 3D network of virtual worlds, Metaverse can be defined as a simulation of a digital environment being accessed by augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR).

There are different Metaverse players in the space. There are players like Decentraland and Sandbox who have gone on to achieve massive success in the space while players like Trace.network, OneRare, etc. are gradually coming up in order to compete at a global level.

The entire space of metaverse is following a similar trajectory to that of WWW. Before Tim Berners-Lee invented world wide web (WWW) in 1989. It was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information sharing between scientists in universities and institutes across the world. Internet had different versions in accordance to what people wanted out of it. The standardized body (WWW)was created afterwards.

"Internet can be easily compared with the same technology like blockchain. It is the same technology that is a network of computers. If each company start creating a network of computers, there is no limit for it and hence has no value. At one point, the standardized body (WWW) was created and everyone joined hands to build that and I think that is exactly what is going to happen here as well," said Ganesh Raju, founder and CEO, Akshay.io in an interaction with Entrepreneur India.

The initiation for standardization of Metaverse is complete. However, we will have wait to see the outcome of the standardization. Will there be a formation of a central body just like World Wide Web in the metaverse spectrum or will the result be completely different remains to be seen.