Highlights:
- Numerous IT behemoths are participants in the Metaverse Standards Forum.
- Currently, Apple is absent from the list of participants.
- Niantic and Roblox were also excluded as participants.
A forum has been established by Meta, Microsoft, and 33 other tech behemoths competing to develop the emerging metaverse concept in order to foster the development industry standards that would make the companies’ nascent digital worlds compatible with each other.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), as well as other well-known standards-setting organisations, are among the participants in the Metaverse Standards Forum, according to a statement released by the group on Tuesday announcing its creation.
Apple is conspicuously absent from the member list at the moment, but many predict that if it launches a mixed reality headset this year or next, it will dominate the metaverse race.
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The developing crypto-based metaverse platforms The Sandbox and Decentraland, as well as the gaming firms Roblox and Niantic, were not participants in the forum.
Although Bloomberg claims that Apple gave its board an early glimpse of the product, the company has not yet officially revealed plans for a headset.
By releasing such a product, Apple would be in direct competition with Meta, a company that has pinned its future on the expansion of the metaverse and has made significant hardware investments to fulfil its goal of interconnected virtual worlds.
As part of its metaverse pivot last year, Meta, then known as Facebook, revealed plans to introduce a mixed-reality headset code-named Cambria this year.
In the past, Apple has contributed significantly to the development of web standards like HTML5. Apple collaborated with Pixar on the USDZ file format and with Adobe to make sure it was supported for three-dimensional content in the metaverse.
Any company is invited to join the forum, including members from the cryptocurrency industry, according to Neil Trevett, an executive at chipmaker Nvidia who is leading the Metaverse Standards Forum.
Without addressing how Apple’s absence might affect that goal, he stated that the forum wants to encourage dialogue between a number of standards organisations and businesses to bring about “real-world interoperability” in the metaverse.
