Metaverse Standards Forum: The Mission to Turn a Buzzword into a Developer Ecosystem
Without a clear definition for the metaverse, the forum risks being perceived as a marketing vehicle for influential technology firms.
Founded by a consortium of technology firms marketing the concept and the standards bodies that want it to be accessible, the Metaverse Standards Forum has the difficult task of setting standards around a concept on which there is no agreed-upon definition, discusses Brian Jackson, research director, Info-Tech Research Group. The vagueness of the concept has some wondering if the effort will truly be able to unify the industry with any clear purpose beyond marketing. But there is an urgent need to start collaborating around standards that will define the digital assets composing the metaverse.
In Steven Spielberg’s 2018 film Ready Player One set in a dystopian 2045, the OASIS is a metaverse wholly owned and produced by one corporation. In the real world in 2022, the metaverse is nowhere near that holistic vision. It’s a loose concept that’s being touted by hundreds of technology companies as the next big thing. If it’s going to happen, they’ll all need to agree on how to build it.
The Metaverse Standards Forum doesn’t know how to define the metaverse, nor does it care to impose any definition. It won’t actually create any standards or really make any company do anything that it doesn’t want to do. Yet, according to its president Neil Trevett, it hopes to do work that is so useful that every organization involved in the metaverse will use it to form a consensus on how to build the immersive digital worlds they envision. Since the real world doesn’t have a single evil corporation in charge of a monopolistic metaverse platform (though you know Mark Zuckerberg is going to try), organizations that want it will have to collaborate.
“We know that we’ll be building a cathedral,” says Trevett in an interview. “Before the architect walks in with a plan, we’re going to need some bricks. So there’s no reason we can’t bake some bricks.”
Announced on June 21, the Metaverse Standards Forum already boasts 650 members and counting. Its membership runs the gamut from the large technology firms driving the hype (Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia), to standards organizations working on specific aspects of the metaverse (W3C and Khronos Group), to a smattering of telcos, retailers, entertainment firms, and crypto startups. Khronos Group is the non-profit organization leading the effort. Trevett is also the president of that organization, which has developed industry standards like OpenGL. He’s also the vice-president of developer ecosystems at Nvidia. He says the consortium members were asking Khronos to create the forum.
“There was a realization that the standards community needed to get better organized,” he says. “We need to make sure the standards are delivered in a timely way. If you end up talking to 24 different groups and then trying to figure out the gaps, that’s not going to work. You need the standards bodies and the industry groups in one place.”
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The Darwinian Evolution of the Metaverse
Being a coordinator of standards bodies means the forum won’t issue standards itself. But it will coordinate and create requirements with input from the industry. It will host projects to develop use cases that further standards-making efforts. The first project is the “Example Asset Interoperability Testbed Project.” It seeks to have creators author a 3D model car in Pixar’s USD format, distill it down to Khronos’ GLTF format, and then put it to use in a runtime demo where a user will open the car’s door, start it, and drive through a course in a physics simulation.
While USD and GLTF are already existing formats, the Forum makes sure they are both expanding into the metaverse in the same way. The formats were originally just made to look at in a digital environment. To interact with them in the metaverse, they’ll require new properties like information about object density and interactive components. In other words, does the car sink or swim, and how do I open the door?
Without a clear definition for the metaverse, the forum risks being perceived as a marketing vehicle for influential technology firms. Trevett says the forum leaves the door open to a Darwinian evolution to determine how the metaverse will unfold. But others are skeptical and see the “metaverse” as the next tech buzzword.
“It reminds me of what Andreessen Horowitz says when they are asked to define web3,” says Sam Gilbert, affiliated researcher at Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. “They don’t really want to limit the definition because what they really want is a brand.”
Vague industry buzzwords build strength because they benefit certain players. Consultants are happy to purport their expertise in the metaverse, launching virtual reality offices to demonstrate their effectiveness. Politicians can also bandy about the term, framing economic development around new opportunities to seem cutting edge.
The effect of continuing without a common goal is that the metaverse is likely to continue its development as it exists today, as a series of different platforms rather than one homogenous space that everyone can interact in à la Ready Player One’s OASIS, Gilbert says.
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It’s Not “the Metaverse” But Many Metaverses
One of the standards bodies included in founding the forum is W3C’s Open Metaverse Interoperability Community Group (OMI). Co-chair Jesse Alton (who goes by @mrmetaverse on Twitter) says his goal is to ensure metaverse development efforts don’t become fragmented. He doesn’t want one big tech working on one version of the metaverse while independent creators toil away on something else.
OMI’s been working on standards for more than a year and produced only a couple. “It’s going to be slow. Companies arguing over stuff,” he says. “And that’s not bad. It takes time, and you have to be careful.”
Alton points to one example of how independent developers might not feel welcome to join the metaverse standards effort. “A lot of brilliant people that I work with in the metaverse only go by their handles. They are experienced people that follow proper processes, but we can’t submit the protocols because these big companies with archaic systems won’t allow us to submit something under ‘Humble Tim,’” he explains. “identity is intimately interwoven in the metaverse. Those handles are just as real as birth names for many of the people working on this.”
In the end, he wouldn’t be surprised to see big firms like Meta leaving the Forum in about a year. The firm may tout interoperability but then tell developers that the path to that is through using its set of SDKs. “You think we’re going to bend the knee?” he says. “That’s never going to happen.”
For Trevett, the success or failure of the effort depends on whether the forum gets projects off the ground that yield interesting results.
“We have an opportunity to drive value. It doesn’t matter if 80% of members are lurking and learning if we can achieve that,” he says. “It’s the first rule of working groups. There’s always a curve. Most of the work is done by 5% of the participants, then there’s the advisors that give input, and then there are the lurkers that outnumber the other two categories.”
In Ready Player One, the plot revolves around a unified virtual environment so immersive that its users would rather inhabit it than the real world. But their virtual utopia is almost lost due to its centralized point of control. In the real world, even if the metaverse landscape will remain fragmented for years to come, at least no one corporation will be able to dictate its terms.
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