The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is pleased to announce that it is a founding member of the newly launched Metaverse Standards Forum.

The Metaverse Standards Forum, hosted by Khronos Group, brings together leading standards organizations and companies for industry-wide cooperation on interoperability standards needed to build the open metaverse. The Forum will explore where the lack of interoperability is holding back metaverse deployment and how the work of Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) defining and evolving needed standards may be coordinated and accelerated.

Everything OGC does can be applied to the Metaverse. Our community can contribute expertise in 3D, Modeling & Simulation, Artificial Intelligence, streaming, Augmented and Virtual Realities, routing, mapping, and more – all at scale. As such, and in addition to OGC’s membership in the Metaverse Standards Forum, OGC is currently in the process of forming an OGC Metaverse Domain Working Group, which will have its inaugural meeting at the 124th OGC Member Meeting in Singapore in October, 2022, which has the theme of Digital Twins and the Metaverse.

“OGC is very pleased to join the Metaverse Standards Forum with our partner organizations, especially at a time when we’re formalizing our own complementary efforts in the OGC Metaverse Domain Working Group,” said OGC CEO, Dr. Nadine Alameh. “We look forward to providing our consortium’s collective expertise in the geospatial and location fields as part of these partnerships across Standards Development Organizations, industry, and more to ensure the emerging metaverse is as relevant and as open as possible.”

“The metaverse will bring together diverse technologies, requiring a constellation of interoperability standards, created and maintained by many standards organizations,” said Neil Trevett, Khronos President. “The Metaverse Standards Forum is a unique venue for coordination between standards organizations and industry, with a mission to foster the pragmatic and timely standardization that will be essential to an open and inclusive metaverse.”

As detailed in the recent OGC Blog post, ‘The Metaverse is Geospatial,’ the Metaverse is perhaps the ultimate distributed digital twin of the world. It has the potential to represent everything in the world alongside imagined spaces. The challenges to Standards Development Organizations (SDOs), technologists, artists, and society are huge, but the payoff is believed to be equally tremendous. The Metaverse is not a single thing but, like the internet, is a collection of platforms and technologies: a world of objects that can be navigated and interacted with.

Multiple industry leaders have stated that the potential of the metaverse will be best realized if it is built on a foundation of open standards. Building an open and inclusive metaverse at scale will demand a constellation of open interoperability standards created by SDOs such as OGC, The Khronos Group, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Open AR Cloud, and many others. The Metaverse Standards Forum aims to foster consensus-based cooperation between diverse SDOs and companies to define and align requirements and priorities for metaverse standards – accelerating their availability and reducing duplication of effort across the industry.

Learn more about the Metaverse Standards Forum at metaverse-standards.org and read about OGC’s efforts in the Metaverse in the post ‘The Metaverse is Geospatial’ on the OGC Blog, or better yet, attend the Metaverse DWG Session at the Digital Twins and Metaverse themed 124th OGC Member Meeting in Singapore this October.

About the Metaverse Standards Forum

The Metaverse Standards Forum brings together companies and standards organizations to foster alignment on requirements and priorities for metaverse interoperability standards, and accelerate their development and deployment through pragmatic, action-based projects. Open to any organization at no cost, founding members include 0xSenses, Academy Software Foundation, Adobe, Alibaba, Autodesk, Avataar, Blackshark.ai, CalConnect, Cesium, Daly Realism, Disguise, the Enosema Foundation, Epic Games, the Express Language Foundation, Huawei, IKEA, John Peddie Research, Khronos, Lamina1, Maxon, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAR Cloud, the Open Geospatial Consortium, Otoy, Perey Research and Consulting, Qualcomm Technologies, Ribose, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Spatial Web Foundation, Unity, VerseMaker, Wayfair, the Web3D Consortium, the World Wide Web Consortium, and the XR Association. Learn more at metaverse-standards.org, or follow the Metaverse Standards Forum on Twitter @metaverse_forum.

About OGC

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is a collective problem-solving community of experts from more than 500 businesses, government agencies, research organizations, and universities driven to make geospatial (location) information and services FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. The global OGC Community engages in a mix of activities related to location-based technologies: developing consensus-based open standards and best-practice; collaborating on agile innovation initiatives; engaging in community meetings, events, and workshops; and more. OGC’s unique standards development process moves at the pace of innovation, with constant input from technology forecasting, practical prototyping, real-world testing, and community engagement. OGC bridges disparate sectors, domains, and technology trends, and encourages the cross-pollination of ideas between different communities of practice to improve decision-making at all levels. OGC is committed to creating an inclusive and sustainable future. Visit ogc.org for more info on our work.