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The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has become a founding member of the newly launched Metaverse Standards Forum.

The Metaverse Standards Forum, hosted by Khronos Group, brings together standards organisations 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 organisations (SDOs) in defining and evolving needed standards may be coordinated and accelerated.

According to the OGC, its community can contribute expertise in 3D, modelling and simulation, AI, streaming, augmented and virtual realities, routing, mapping and more.

To that end, the OGC is 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 organisations, especially at a time when we’re formalising 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 organisations, 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 organisations,” said Neil Trevett, Khronos President.

“The Metaverse Standards Forum is a unique venue for coordination between standards organisations and industry, with a mission to foster the pragmatic and timely standardisation that will be essential to an open and inclusive metaverse.”

The Metaverse is perhaps the ultimate distributed digital twin of the world. It is not a single thing but, like the internet, it is a collection of platforms and technologies — a world of objects that can be navigated and interacted with.

It has the potential to represent everything in the world alongside imagined spaces.

The challenges for SDOs, technologists and society are huge, but the payoff is expected to be equally tremendous.

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