The Metaverse hype was the dominant storyline in the tech industry through 2022. But after the initial hype from Meta (formerly Facebook), the industry realized that for the Metaverse to succeed, it needed to define and partner with open standards. formed according to those criteria. Therefore, last June the Khronos Group launched a new open standards discussion forum called the Metaverse Standards Forum.
To find out how the forum has progressed over the past nine months, I spoke again with group leader Neil Trevet. Trevett is also President of Khronos and Vice President of Developer Ecosystem at Nvidia.
The main news today is that the Forum, with over 2,400 participating organizations, has been incorporated as an independent industry consortium. It currently hosts nine active domain groups, addressing topics ranging from 3D asset interoperability to privacy, security, and identity. Mr. Trevet will continue to lead the forum for the time being, but will eventually conduct the election process for the post.
The forum states on its homepage that its goal is to “promote open metaverse interoperability standards”. Meta has also used the word “interoperable” regularly in his communications, but he hasn’t made much progress in the interoperability of his 3D world in the last year. So I asked his Trevett what some early success stories were on the interoperability project forums.
He responded by pointing out the work done to make USD interoperable with the glTF format. glTF is a file format for 3D graphics invented by the Khronos Group, which promotes it as “his JPEG in 3D”. USD is similar to Photoshop format, psd, in that it is the native format for authoring 3D graphics files.
According to Trevett, one active working group is focused on glTF/USD 3D asset interoperability.
“The first project that surfaced was starting a project that could take a glTF asset, import it into the USD toolchain, and re-export it back,” he said. It is.” — at least in terms of visual fidelity. ”
Image via Metaverse Standards Forum
Even behind the scenes, this is already having a big impact on the industry, Trevet argues.
“A lot of tools don’t import and export properly,” he said. “This is a real issue that is holding back many companies in the Khronos space that are working on 3D commerce, which they are deploying with glTF. [and] They are using USD authoring more and more.this is really hurting people right now [and] We believe we can make a big difference for many companies in this area. ”
Image via Metaverse Standards Forum
3D commerce (meaning e-commerce companies that use 3D technology) is one of the few sectors fully committed to the metaverse. Trevett called it a “beachhead use case” and added that it’s not just about fixing authoring incompatibilities.
“It’s pretty big [of a] The Problem — Even if you can import and export assets, how do you get them to display consistently across different platforms? When you see it in a reality app, [if] It looks completely different and it’s okay. This is something we’ve been working on for a while and we have an audience certification program. ”
Where will AI come into play?
Despite advances in e-commerce, it is clear that the Metaverse has not yet made widespread consumer market reach, unless we consider Horizon Worlds, the metaverse’s dominant virtual world. Trevett defines the Metaverse as “his web connectivity with the immersion of spatial computing,” but he’s curious as to what kind of consumer applications come to represent the Metaverse. is not. However, we did comment on some of the technologies that are paving the way for the 3D Internet.
“These technologies clearly include GPU advances in rendering and simulation XR. Again, they’re going through their own hype cycle, but they’re making progress. Networking; already We’re talking about 10G, decentralized trust and storage, and Web3 as a whole [domain],in short [a] young domain. And especially in the current zeitgeist, AI and machine learning. ”
Given the current hype around generative AI, I asked if the forums were considering open standards on how to use AI within the metaverse.
“The golden rule of standardization is that R&D is not done by standards or committees,” he laughs. “This is the worst way to do research and development. You need people to experiment and run your own technology. [to figure out] What works and what doesn’t. The field of AI is advancing so fast right now that it’s hard to know what to standardize. ”
Having said that, he mentioned ONNX [Open Neural Network Exchange], a project of The Linux Foundation, is an “open standard for machine learning interoperability”. Khronos also has his project NNEF [Neural Network Exchange Format]he said, which is “more focused on the hardware side of things.”
“Now is not the right time to jump in,” Trevett said of AI metaverse standards. “But I think it will happen within the next six months. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, at some point, perhaps an AI working group was formed in the 3D space of generating 3D models. Then something like NeRF there is also [neural radiance field], to encode the 3D scene into a neural network. It will be great for 3D commerce. ”
Conclusion
In summary, metaverse technology is still in its early stages. Interoperable standards are forming around formats (such as USD and glTF), technologies such as GPUs are constantly improving, and new technologies such as generative AI are still in the research stage (prestandards).
This is the kind of core work that doesn’t make for the kind of sexy headlines that Meta and its ilk need to keep stocks rising. But I’m happy that the Metaverse Standards Forum is making this effort. They keep the open metaverse dream alive.
