Metaverse Standards Forum becomes official non-profit industry consortium

The Metaverse Standards Forum announced it has been incorporated as an independent non-profit industry consortium.

The news comes after nine months of incubation by the Khronos Group. The forum’s mission continues unchanged—to enable, foster and promote cooperation and coordination over metaverse-related interoperability between standards organizations, companies, and universities.

In June 2022, the forum was launched and driven by the Khronos Group. Today, with over 2,400 members and multiple active working and exploratory groups focused on driving pragmatic interoperability advances, the Metaverse Standards Forum has organized its own governance, finances, and operations.

The working group activities remain freely accessible to any member, while new paid membership tiers enable members to be elected to leadership roles in the forum while funding forum projects.

“Interoperability is the key to the metaverse scaling to its full potential beyond siloed games, experiences, and worlds, and the unprecedented level of participation in the forum demonstrates strong industry interest in the broad cooperation necessary to bring that vision to life,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and initial president of the Metaverse Standards Forum, in a statement.

He added, “The forum does not itself develop standards but exists to help accelerate the mission of any industry initiative working for metaverse interoperability through fostering participation, building cooperative consensus and insights, and driving wider visibility for their efforts. We invite all interested organizations to participate in the now fully independent forum.”

The Metaverse Standards Forum launched with 37 founding members and has grown to include a diverse range of standards organizations and companies, industry consortia, platform vendors, hardware manufacturers, and end-user organizations.

The forum maintains a pipeline of member-driven exploratory and working groups to address metaverse interoperability challenges and opportunities across multiple domains that have been prioritized by the forum membership. As the forum does not create standards, participation creates no patent licensing obligations. All members are enabled to participate in forum working group meetings and forum activities are non-confidential, with all deliverables being freely and publicly distributed.

Forum working groups operate under member-created charters that define pragmatic short-term projects that prioritize generating interoperability requirements and testing results to assist member organizations accelerate their goals.

The first working groups include:

• Metaverse Standards Register building a public database mapping the landscape of metaverse-related standardization activities and open standards.
• 3D Asset Interoperability enabling alignment and cooperation between the Universal Scene Description (USD) and glTF 3D file formats.
• Real/virtual world integration examining and encouraging interoperability for use cases such as digital twins and visual positioning systems.
• Asset management exploring the digital rights standards landscape for identity, ownership, protection, transport, exchange, and monetization of digital virtual assets.

In addition, multiple forum exploratory groups are building consensus on charters for upcoming working groups, including: 3D web interoperability, interoperable avatars and characters, digital fashion and wearables, metaverse network requirements, end-user troubleshooting, and metaverse privacy, cybersecurity, and identity.

Any forum member may propose, participate in, or stand for election to lead a domain working group.

As a newly independent non-profit organization, the Metaverse Standards Forum’s membership structure will evolve over the coming months. New members may immediately join the organization as participant or principal members. Current members will be offered continuing membership privileges for a transitional period.

Principal members play a key leadership role in the forum, enjoy priority marketing and networking privileges, and may stand for election to the forum board of directors. Principal membership dues have been carefully tiered to enable and encourage participation by organizations of all types and sizes.

Membership in the Metaverse Standards Forum is open to all.