Source: The Economic Times
Big Techs such as Meta Platforms Inc and Microsoft Corp, along with others racing to develop the emerging concept of metaverse have come together to form a group. Reportedly, this group is to facilitate the development of industry standards that would aid in making the premature digital worlds of these tech giants compatible with one another.
The companies taking part in Metaverse Standards Forum include organisations in the space sector, and chip makers from gaming giants. Along with it, established standards-setting entities such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These aspects were revealed by the group in a statement from Tuesday, June 21 when they announced its creation.
However, a rather noticeable absence in the forum is that of Apple Inc’s as a member of the group. Nevertheless, analysts are expecting the iPhone maker to emerge as a dominant player in the metaverse race soon. Specifically, they stated that this would be as soon as they introduce the mixed reality headset either this year or the following.
Additionally, some gaming companies such as Niantic and Roblox were not part of the forum either. In fact, even certain upcoming crypto-based metaverse platforms such as Decentraland and The Sandbox were not included.
Apple’s stance on the new product:
Though Apple Inc has given the board a teaser of its headset, the tech giant has not yet acknowledged any plans for the product yet publicly. Additionally, it did not acknowledge any requests made for a comment on the new development surrounding the standards forum. Clearly, the introduction of such a device would place Apple directly in competition with Facebook parent Meta.
On the other hand, it has further put its future of the metaverse’s growth on risk and placed heavy investment in hardware. As we know, Zuckerberg did this in order to develop his own vision of interconnected virtual worlds into a reality. Moreover, it revealed plans for a mixed-reality headset which has the code name ‘Cambria,’ and is set to be released this year.
Evidently, Apple has shown heavy involvement in the creation of web standards such as HTML5 previously. Moreover, the tech giant worked with Pixar for metaverse’s 3D content on a ‘USDZ” file format, with Adobe to make sure it supported this format.
An executive at Nvidia, Neil Trevett stated that any company is welcome to join the standards group, which includes ones from the crypto world. The chip maker is reportedly chairing the Metaverse Standards Forum. The forum’s goal is to foster communication between various standards organisation and companies. Mainly, this is to get the ‘real-world interoperability’ in the metaverse.
