Why building the metaverse is going to be an "exciting race"

The metaverse is about to disrupt our lives; its development should not be taken lightly.

Its construction should not be rushed by a few companies; it must be careful, calculated, thoughtful and above all collaborative.

That was the key point of a panel discussion (hosted by GamesBeat's Dean Takahashi) on the technical standards and building blocks of the metaverse at this week's MetaBeat event.

“Whenever you create something large that involves many parties around the world, it is essential that you have good standards to build on; otherwise it will not succeed,” said Rev Lebaredian, Vice President of Omniverse and Simulation Technology at Nvidia.

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As a starting point, the Khronos Group is an open, not-for-profit consortium that develops, publishes, and maintains royalty-free interoperability standards for 3D graphics, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR ), parallel computing, vision acceleration and machine learning (ML).

In June, the group created the Metaverse Standards Forum [subscription required]. The impetus, explained Khronos President Neil Trevett, was widespread confusion around the standards. Organizations were basically coming to Khronos for advice and saying, 'Standards community, get on with it,' he said.

The goal was to create a forum where the many ad hoc standardization groups that form can communicate and coordinate, he said. It all started with 37 contributing companies - and after just a few months there are now 1,800 companies involved.

“It speaks to the fact that there is a real interest, genuine interest and need to engage with the standards community, and a willingness to engage,” Trevett said.

The forum is now divided into working groups, he explained.

Ultimately, the effort will provide "a big in-funnel for expertise, a big out-billboard for visibility".

Developing standards is undoubtedly difficult, acknowledges Lebaredian. There is always controversy and politics. But, he pointed out, in the early days of the web, standards emerged because people worked together to create protocols such as HTTP and HTML.

"Without standards, the metaverse simply won't be possible," he said.

What's playing out now is "exactly analogous" to the evolution of the web: it took off because it was accessible to everyone, Lebaredian said.

"The metaverse is the canvas for these virtual worlds, our equivalent of an experience, a 3D spatial thing," he said.

Everyone should participate and contribute to the development of the metaverse. Without standardization, only a small group of people will build it, which will limit its scale and value.

"I just don't see how this could exist if we don't start from scratch with interoperability standards," he said.

Given the technology and amount of content needed to make the Metaverse a reality, "no one company can do it all", h...