Microsoft, Meta, and others are founding a metaverse open standards group

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

33 companies and organizations have formed a standards group for "metaverse" tech The Metaverse Standards Forum is supposed to promote open standards.

Hackathons and prototyping tools will be focused on by the Metaverse Standards Forum. Many players can't even agree on what a "metaverse" is, so it wants to develop "consistent terminology" for the space. In addition to the companies above, the group's founding members include major pre-metaverse entities like the World Wide Web Consortium.

It doesn't have a lot of big names. There is no sign of Apple working on virtual reality and augmented reality. Games and virtual worlds like Niantic and Roblox are not present. The group expects to hold its first meeting in 2022.

The potential of the metaverse will be best realized if it is built on a foundation of open standards according to industry leaders. A constellation of open interoperability standards is needed to build an open and inclusive metaverse.

Many of the subfields have standards bodies that have joined the Metaverse Standards Forum. Open standards don't mean companies will create a space like the World Wide Web The game is described as a self contained metaverse. It's possible that open standards will make it easier for developers to build the same content for different platforms, or for users to export data from one service to another.

The forum is interested in formalizingverse development as a unified field. It shows which companies are most interested in creating accepted standards and which ones want to be seen as supporting them.