The cutting-edge technology company joins other leading organizations in the open Forum designed to foster industry-wide cooperation on interoperability standards, laying the foundation for and tapping the potential of the Metaverse.
NVIDIA announced its role as a founding member of the Metaverse Standards Forum, an open venue for interested parties to discuss and debate how best to build the foundations of the Metaverse. The Forum brings together companies for industry-wide cooperation on interoperability standards needed to build the open Metaverse. The next big step in the evolution of the internet, the Metaverse, presents opportunities for every industry, from entertainment to automotive to manufacturing and robotics.
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, the free 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 developing consistent terminology and deployment guidelines.
The value and necessity of industry-wide cooperation on interoperability standards date back to 1993 when there was the introduction of a standard and open way of describing a web page — HyperText Markup Language, or HTML, paving the way to the success of the web. The early web and internet creators understood that open standards, particularly for data formats, were accelerators of growth and a network effect.
To advance the evolution of the Metaverse, it is essential that moving between 3D worlds, using various tools, viewers, and browsers, the standards must be consistent with creating a seamless experience. One such tool is Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (USD), an open and extensible format, library, and composition engine that is one of the building blocks needed to expand the Metaverse. Another is glTF, a 3D transmission format developed within Khronos Group.
The potential of the Metaverse will rely on a foundation of open standards to build on. Building an open and inclusive metaverse demands 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, and the Spatial Web Foundation. The Metaverse Standards Forum’s mission is 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.”
"The metaverse will bring together diverse technologies, requiring a constellation of interoperability standards, created and maintained by many standards organizations,” said Neil Trevett vice president of developer ecosystems at NVIDIA and the president of The Khronos Group. "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."
Founding members of the Metaverse Standards Forum include 0xSenses; Academy Software Foundation; Adobe; Alibaba; Autodesk; Avataar; Blackshark.ai; CalConnect; Cesium; Daly Realism; Disguise; the Enosema Foundation; Epic Games; the Express Language Foundation; Huawei; IKEA; Jon Peddie Research; Khronos; Lamina1; Maxon; Meta; Microsoft; NVIDIA; OpenAR Cloud; the Open Geospatial Consortium; Otoy; Perey Research and Consulting; Qualcomm Technologies; Ribose; Sony Interactive Entertainment; Spatial Web Foundation; Unity; VerseMaker; Wayfair; the Web3D Consortium; the World Wide Web Consortium; and the XR Association (XRA).
Source: NVIDIA
Debbie Diamond Sarto is news editor at Animation World Network.
