What's the news? Meta, Epic Games, Microsoft, and 34 other companies and organisations have come together to form the Metaverse Standards Forum for cooperation on interoperability standards needed to build the metaverse, the forum announced on June 21. Why does this matter? Unlike the internet, the Metaverse is being pitched as a much more open and interoperable technology, meaning data, digital assets, content, etc. can be taken from one platform to another seamlessly. For example, the game skin you buy in Counter Strike can also be used in Fortnite or you have one avatar as the user account across all platforms built on the metaverse. However, for this to become reality, there needs to be open standards and specifications that platforms can adopt. "I do think that, just like you have the W3C [World Wide Web Consortium] that helps set standards around a bunch of the important internet protocols and how people build the web, I think there will need to be some of that here too, for defining how developers and creators can build experiences that allow someone to take their avatar and their digital goods and their friends, and be able to teleport seamlessly between all these different experiences," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last year. The Metaverse Standards Forum appears to be the first big step in this direction. “I don’t think in the future, people are going to call the work that individual companies do a metaverse. Hopefully, if we’re successful collectively in building a system that’s more interoperable,…
