What, Exactly, Is the Metaverse Standards Forum Creating?

The building blocks of what developers need today are the focus of the Metaverse Standards Forum. People can argue about the name.

What virtual world do we need to live in?

Dealing with a lot of data is inevitable when designing virtual worlds. Geometry data, such as the shape of the object, is one of the many things that make up a character in a video game.

Khronos hopes that the standards of theMSF will make it easy for people to read that data. JPEGs are so easy to transfer that no amount of security can stop someone from saving one of them. 3D objects do not know which way to go. If you can't import it from one game engine to another, it may break.

One Khronos project is trying to help here. The open standard is competing with other 3D formats. The format of OBJ is very limited, inefficient, and clunky, which makes it seem like it's a picture. It's a bit similar to PSDs. The format is owned by a single company.

The metaphor is strained so much that it resembles the JPEG of the 3D world. Khronos is hoping it will be. The JPEG format was so important because it was an open standard that was lightweight and useful enough to be widely adopted. It could end up being just another item in the long list of file types you can import into Blender.

If only as a check on proprietary technology, the need for interoperability will exist. There's a danger that proprietary technologies will get baked into the infrastructure of the metaverse if there's a big lag between the technology becoming available and the standard that makes it open.

You don't have a choice if there isn't a standard.

The boring stuff is being sold.

Don't worry if it's hard to wrap your head around the idea of developing standards for a virtual world that won't ever happen. You are not the only one. The Metaverse Standards Forum is helping to bootstrap but will not be running in the future. Or is the term still being used?

It could be replaced with something else. I don't think that's important. It could go the way of the internet. We don't use that a lot anymore. We still use the internet that was described in the past.

The idea of a fantasy virtual world, no matter how impractical or even undesirable, is more exciting than talking about data exchange formats. A wide array of exciting tech is changing how we interact with the internet.

Is that ready player one? Will it be a collection of disparate industries doing a lot of cool things, but not necessarily a single fantasy world? It's hard to tell. Maybe it's not that difficult. Someone needs to build it no matter what the future holds.