Is "Metaverse Standards Forum" a Real Deal, or Is It Just as Useless as The United Nations?
Can we realistically even set any standard for the metaverse now? Is it the time yet to talk interoperability?
The Metaverse Standards Forum was launched in June 2022 with 35 founding members. This includes Adobe, Alibaba, Autodesk, Avataar, Epic Games, Huawei, IKEA, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Qualcomm Technologies, the World Wide Web Consortium, and the XR Association (XRA).
Over 1800 organizations have now joined the forum and more are joining every day.
Taken from their website : The Metaverse Standards Forum brings together leading standards organizations and companies for industry-wide cooperation on interoperability standards needed to build the open 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.
Credit : metaverse-standards.org
Now the biggest question I have in mind about this is, who is going to benefit the most from The Metaverse Standards Forum?
Well as of the moment, we really do not have that one winning VR hardware prototype yet that has been adopted en masse worldwide, such as the smartphones. The hardware game challenge has not been cracked yet and the race winner has yet to be announced.
Hence, any standardization at this point will only benefit the companies providing fundamental infrastructure and fundamental layers of the metaverse, such as chips, graphic cards, rendering engines and operational systems.
The metaverse’s fundamental infrastructure is still in its infancy, or I would say, toddlership. Therefore, the biggest beneficiaries of having a standard being set up NOW, are only the companies that support the fundamental layers of the system, such as companies that offer chips, graphic cards, rendering engines and operational systems. The display manufacturers in particular, are going to benefit, for example LG Display, Samsung, BOE Technology and so on. GPU manufacturers are definitely going to benefit as well, for example Huawei, Qualcomm and Nvidia.
Credit : metaverse-standards.org
However I would not label these companies as “true blue” metaverse companies as a metaverse company needs to directly become the gateway to a wholly immersive virtual space, populated with virtual beings constructing complex socioeconomic relationships and identities. A true blue metaverse company’s main revenue will also have to be generated from this metaverse.
Khronos president Neil Trevett tells WIRED that the Metaverse Standards Forum (or MSF)—is not a new standards organization, but a “venue for cooperation” between existing standards organizations and companies—to help develop new tools for the metaverse, even if we have not exactly figured out what, if anything, the term “metaverse” even means.
Credit : WIRED
Nevertheless it is still a good idea to join the Metaverse Standards Forum at the moment, in order to position yourself as an industry player on this next generation internet, even if you are just the adjacent or the infrastructural support for the true blue metaverse companies such as Meta, Epic Games, STEPVR, and so on.
I am looking forward to seeing who is going to win the VR hardware race and set the global standards for VR portals and interfaces, as Apple has done with their consistent iteration of the iPhones. My own company STEPVR is definitely a strong contender in this race too.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote how bullish I am that the next winner will come from Asia, and that winners will rule not only the next internet era, but also the geopolitical dominance of the world.
So what are we waiting for?
The race is on. Ready, get set, go!