The metaverse is a new enough concept to have a different meaning to different people. Some think of the metaverse as a space for digital twins, for example, while others associate it with more immersive video games. One thing is certain, however: Large companies have already invested considerable sums to establish themselves in the metaverse.
Qualcomm, for example, has launched a $100 million “Snapdragon Metaverse” fund and is working with Square Enix on XR games. This fund will be used to support developers creating XR experiences.
To ensure that these investments pay off, several major organizations have joined as founding members of the Metaverse Standards Forum – a meeting place for companies and standards organizations that want to influence the standards that will serve as the foundation of an open metaverse. .
“We’re creating a new interface with the internet that’s more like the interface we’ve had with the world around us forever,” Rev Lebaredian, Nvidia’s vice president of omniversal engineering and technology, told ZDNet. simulation. “A 3D world that resembles the one we inhabit”.
The forum, he added, “will open [le métavers] more uses and will make it more natural for more people to join in and use it to do all kinds of things.”
The list of founding members includes several major technology companies, such as Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, Autodesk, Adobe, Alibaba, Epic Games, Huawei, Qualcomm and Sony. There are also retail giants Ikea and Wayfair. The forum currently includes organizations like the Spatial Web Foundation, the Web3D Consortium, the Khronos Group, and the World Wide Web Consortium.
What kinds of standards are needed in the metaverse? To answer this question, forum members look at the basics of the web.
It took twenty years to develop HTML5
“The first internet, before the web, had a very abstract and simple interface,” Lebaredian said. “There was only text. You had to connect to a modem and type commands in a shell. … It was limited mainly to computer people. When we introduced the web, we opened it up to a large number of people, and now to billions of people, because they can interface more naturally with images, text and video.”
One of the main standards that opened up the web is HTML, the markup language that allows text and images with hyperlinks to be added to web pages. It took about 20 years to develop HTML5, which allows more videos and feature-rich applications to be delivered to the web. According to Lebaredian, developing mature standards for the metaverse could take just as long.
“So we should start as soon as possible,” he added.
The forum is open free of charge to all organisations. It aims to emphasize pragmatic projects, such as implementation prototyping, hackathons, plugfests, and open source tools, to facilitate testing and adoption of metaverse standards.
According to Lebaredian, the forum should ideally include companies from all verticals, including manufacturing, AEC (architecture, engineering, construction) and healthcare. According to Lebaredian, IKEA has already invested heavily in 3D technologies, which shows how retailers will use the metaverse. Most of the images in its catalog, for example, are all digitally rendered.
“You can imagine pretty much every major industry benefiting from this, as they did with the web,” Lebaredian said.
To go further on the metaverse
Source: “ZDNet.com”