The development of technology drives the largest companies to unite through consortia such as the Metaverse Standards Forum.
As more technology companies develop virtual and augmented reality products, some groups overseeing the industry are trying to keep the industry on a single page. The latest of these is the Metaverse Standards Forum, which aims to promote open interoperability, which could enable developers to create projects on platforms.
As announced today, the forum already has some major participants including Meta, Microsoft, Epic Games, Adobe, NVIDIA, Sony, Unity, and more. But there are also some glaring absences, including companies like Niantic, Apple, Roblox, and Snapchat, which are also building “metaverse” products for consumers.
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The Metaverse Standards Forum is free to join and plans to focus on «real action‑based projects», such as hackathons and open‑source tools.
«There will be no second version of Meta, just as there is no «Microsoft internet» or «Google internet» today, explained the president of global affairs at Meta, Nick Clegg, in a blog post last month. «Just as the Internet, the metaverse will be an interconnected system that will transcend national borders, therefore there will need to be a web of public and private prerequisites and rules that will allow it to operate in all jurisdictions».
However, consortia such as the Metaverse Standards Forum are effective only if several companies adopt their standards.
Tiffany Xingyu Wang, chief security officer at Spectrum Labs overseeing AI content, launched the Oasis Consortium earlier this year. In an effort to promote a greater level of security commitments from gaming and social networking companies, the Oasis Consortium developed a list of user security standards, which she hopes will become the new industry standard.
«If the metaverse is going to survive, it must also provide security», said Wang in Technology Review.
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Content supervision is especially difficult in virtual reality, when online harassment or abuse can become even more terrifying due to the immersive nature of the technology. And in some cases, it appears that companies prioritize product development over strong security tools.
Similar to the Metaverse Standards Forum, some key factors are missing from the Oasis Consortium, such as Meta. And in the past, groups like this became increasingly smaller when internal conflicts inevitably arose.
The Metaverse Standards Forum is run by the Khronos Group, a non-profit consortium working on AR/VR, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and more. Khronos has already attempted to set a standard for VR APIs with the VR Standards Initiative in 2016, which included companies like Google, NVIDIA, Epic Games, and Oculus, which are now part of Meta.
Source: techcrunch.com
