Have I Got Some Metaverse Standards for You

By Sandy Ressler, National Institute of Standards and Technology

IEEE Metaverse Newsletter, 2024

 

Introduction

The Metaverse is a virtual place in which simulations of people and objects exist in a persistent form. People can communicate with each other, perform economic transactions, and of course play games. It remains unclear if a single “Metaverse” will arise, like “The Web”, or if many metaverses each a proprietary walled garden will become prevalent. Interoperability between these metaverses is the preferred outcome. Standards focused on interoperability help to prevent vendor lock-in and enable global innovation.

Fortunately, there is a remarkable amount of standards activity. In fact it seems that if you’ve got a standard’s organization then you must have a project dealing with the metaverse. Like most things this is good and bad. Good that so much interest has arisen in such a short period of time. Bad in that it’s confusing to figure out who is doing what and who are the key players. This article reduces the confusion and highlights those standards and industry activities that will no doubt affect our interactions with the forthcoming “Metaverse”. This list is not exhaustive.

*DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not represent NIST. In addition any mention of commercial products are for illustrative purposes and do not imply endorsement by NIST.

 

The Big Ones

It is astonishing how many traditional standards efforts, concerning the metaverse, are taking place. Let’s take a closer look at some of these efforts from large, experienced standards organizations.

ISO and IEC are two separate standardization organizations that often perform joint activities, thus many of the standards are listed as ISO/IEC 12345.

 

All One Needs to Know About Metaverse

ISO/IEC is the big global organization for standards, to quote from them: “ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is an independent, non-governmental international organization with a membership of 169 national standards bodies.” It’s amazing that a single organization about standards has 169 country members. The United Nations has 193 member bodies. Several of the metaverse standards efforts are taking place under the auspices of ISO standards development.

In addition to work explicitly concerning the metaverse, some of the components which comprise the metaverse also have standards activities. These include things like 3D file formats, networking, privacy and identity and economic transactions using the blockchain.

When it comes to 3D file formats, two in particular dominate the metaverse, glTF and USD. glTF (graphics language transmission format) is often characterized as the JPEG of 3D and is evolving under the auspices of the Khronos Group. glTF is in fact an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 12113:2022). USD (Universal Scene Description) is “the first publicly available software that addresses the need to robustly and scalably interchange and augment arbitrary 3D scenes that may be composed from many elemental assets.” USD is under the control of Pixar which developed it for their movies. It is very robust but also large and complicated. USDs continued evolution is shifting to a more open model in terms of membership and participation and is being led by a new consortium called AOUSD (Alliance for OpenUSD) the stated intent is to eventually move it through the ISO process much as glTF has done. USD has been declared as the “chosen” 3D file format by many large companies including Apple, NVIDIA, Audodesk and Adobe. There are however several flavors of USD and compatibility is still being worked out. When it comes to the delivery of 3D assets over the Web glTF is clearly more efficient and lightweight, however it lacks the version controls of USD which was designed for large teams of artists collaborating on a huge environment such as a movie. In fact USD and glTF both have their places in a future Metaverse. The Metaverse Standards Forum (MSF) is providing a venue for technical experts to collaborate, often a rare feat.

The MPAI-MMM Moving Picture, Audio and Data Coding by Artificial Intelligence – a new standards effort that is derived from and extends MPEG (Motion Pictures Expert Group) which was responsible for the wildly successful MP3 audio format and MPEG video formats which enabled the digital media industry to come into existence. It’s a complicated process involving a lot of intellectual property issues. One of the MPAI’s efforts is called the MPAI Metaverse Model and has gone through a significant development phase.

MPAI is a breakaway group from the original MPEG effort, which was purely within ISO and IEC. It is an international non-profit organization. MPAI seeks to address some of the perceived shortcomings of the MPEG process particularly in the domain of IP (intellectual property).

“The MPAI Metaverse Model (MPAI-MMM) is an MPAI project developing Technical Reports and Technical Specifications supporting Metaverse Interoperability. Before that, MPAI has produced the Functionalities and Functionality Profiles Technical Reports and the MPAI-MMM – Architecture Technical Specification.” This is an interesting effort led by the same group, and some of the same people that brought us MPEG. Clearly MPEG, and the suite of standards in its purview has been one of the most impactful sets of standards. They brought us DVDs, CDs, streaming video and audio changing the media landscape forever. As they approach the Metaverse, their track record alone means that they are worth paying attention to,

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The ITU is the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies – ICTs. The ITU has a “focus group” about the metaverse: ITU Focus Group on metaverse (FG-MV). It is another large organization, experienced in the development of suites of standards. They have had significant success and impact in a variety of telecommunications applications such as audio compression, and internet protocol television including the widely used H.264 standard. The ITU has organized a large collection of 9 working groups and at the time of this writing there are 31 Technical Specifications and reports that have been approved. That’s a lot of work! See https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/focusgroups/mv/Pages/deliverables.aspx for the complete list of deliverables.

Independent Standardization Development Organizations

There are a variety of SDOs (Standard Development Organizations) that have sprung up to address the many issues involved in creating a useful metaverse. Some are more formal than others.

From a blog post (https://omigroup.org/omi-is-growing-up/) by the OMIgroup: “Apart from the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group, which is literally what OMI stands for, OMI also stands for grassroots participation. We are a loose collective of people with a shared interest in the Metaverse, and shared goals of creating assets, standards, protocols, knowledge and energy for the Metaverse. We represent a social connection between different metaverse groups.” The OMIGroup publishes a series of blogs and maintains a github repository which is a good way to follow what is happening. They created a set of glTF extensions and have developed a community of participants that interact primarily via their own Discord server.

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Khronos Group – The Khronos Group has a long history of developing 3D graphics standards. It took over responsibilities for GL, WebGL and now glTF. In addition the Khronos Group started and initiated the management of the Metaverse Standards Forum (MSF) a group that provides a forum for interested parties to collaborate about metaverse issues although it explicitly does NOT develop standards. The Khronos Group’s major project is the evolution of Vulkan, a widely used API to standardize high performance graphics via the efficient use of GPUs. As graphics are a key component of the Metaverse this is an important standard. glTF has become the “JPEG of 3D” for graphics on the Web. It is widely supported, efficient and it is evolving to meet the needs of industry. (Full disclosure: I participate in glTF development.) Significantly, glTF has gone through the ISO standardization process and is, in fact, an ISO standard: ISO/IEC 12113:2022 Information technology – Runtime 3D asset delivery format – Khronos glTF™ 2.0

Khronos Group – The Khronos Group has a long history of developing 3D graphics standards. It took over responsibilities for GL, WebGL and now glTF. In addition the Khronos Group started and initiated the management of the Metaverse Standards Forum (MSF) a group that provides a forum for interested parties to collaborate about metaverse issues although it explicitly does NOT develop standards. The Khronos Group’s major project is the evolution of Vulkan, a widely used API to standardize high performance graphics via the efficient use of GPUs. As graphics are a key component of the Metaverse this is an important standard.

glTF has become the “JPEG of 3D” for graphics on the Web. It is widely supported, efficient and it is evolving to meet the needs of industry. (Full disclosure: I participate in glTF development.) Significantly, glTF has gone through the ISO standardization process and is, in fact, an ISO standard: ISO/IEC 12113:2022 Information technology – Runtime 3D asset delivery format – Khronos glTF™ 2.0

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W3C – The World Wide Web Consortium is responsible for the standards that run “The Web”. Web browsers are arguably one of the most influential pieces of software (actually a collection of specs) in the history of software. Specifications like HTML and HTTP let anyone create documents which can be viewed in web browsers on any type of computer or smartphone. The W3C specs are living documents and evolve. There is a specific working group looking to make 3D objects first class data elements which can appear and behave as desired right in your web pages. Sometimes those web pages can even be viewed while wearing an HMD (Head Mounted Display) which allows the user to become fully immersed in web content. The Immersive Web Working Group of the W3C is diligently working on APIs to extend the web to VR and AR devices. VR and AR are collectively referred to as XR devices.

The spec most important to the evolving Metaverse is WebXR which is suppoted (at least partially) by several web browsers. Significantly Apple has announced that Safari will support WebXR in the fall of 2024, marking a milestone in WebXR’s more widespread support.

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The Web3D Consortium is responsible for the X3D suite of standards. These are ISO standards which started off as VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) in the mid 70s and (they used to be the VRML Consortium) and have evolved into X3D. The W3D pioneered making ISO standards public with a breakthrough agreement allowing the actual ISO standards to be jointly copyrighted by both organizations. X3D continues to evolve and is in version 4. It is particularly useful as a robust set of free tools to display 3D content on Web pages, a natural progression to the Metaverse. A great set of example uses can be found at: https://web3d.org/case-studies

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IEEE SA – The IEEE Standards Association is one of the most significant standards groups out there. It too has several activities specifically aimed at advancing progress in the development of an interoperable metaverse.. One is the IEEE Metaverse Congress Webinar Series, a continually evolving series of webinars. The IEEE efforts concerning the Metaverse are carefully constructed to eventually lead to freely available standards. On the introduction page of the Metaverse Congress they state “The IEEE Metaverse Congress, organized by IEEE Standards Association, is a series of sessions (virtual or hybrid) to provide a global and comprehensive view of the Metaverse.”

IEEE has published a number of white papers about the metaverse dealing with issues such as ethics, governance,and privacy. These important issues must be addressed along with the technical standards if we are to have an impactful set of interoperable metaverses. IEEE has a history of technical standards leadership and their activities should be closely monitored.

 

Standards Adjacent

In addition to the efforts from traditional SDOs and organizations using open source development processes to generate standards, there are a few organizations involved in significant activities. While they are not specifically developing standards, they are guiding policy, serve as a forum for communications between the numerous standards organizations and provide testing services to determine conformity to a given standard.

The UL certification mark is a valued testing and safety service provided by UL for many years applied to physical products. The UL mark on your toaster oven ensures that it probably won’t catch fire. That’s a good thing! UL is offering certifications of VR headsets. They refer to the certification as a VRMark. Testing VR headsets is performed via a series of levels they call Rooms. “A Room is a piece of VR content carefully designed to require a specific level of VR performance.” Orange, Cyan and Blue Room testing offers increasingly strenuous testing. It’s an interesting attempt at providing some quality control to the wild west of VR headsets and that is a welcome development.

Next, we have the World Economic Forum (WEF). You know that big meeting that’s in the news and in Davos Switzerland every year? Well that’s actually a meeting of the World Economic Forum. It has a series of initiatives dealing with the Metaverse, such as identity, mental health, and industry. The mission of the WEF is to be: “the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation. It provides a global, impartial and not-for-profit platform for meaningful connection between stakeholders to establish trust, and build initiatives for cooperation and progress.” They have produced a white paper: World Economic Forum’s Privacy and Safety in the Metaverse report

These are not standards efforts so much as an attempt at defining the social and economic impacts, as well as addressing issues of sustainability. They are attempting to provide coherent guidance towards the development of the Metaverse and given the importance of the organization it makes sense to track their progress.

Last (but not least) we have the Metaverse Standards Forum (MSF). Operated by the Khronos Group the MSF was started only a couple of years ago and had a remarkable period of growth with over 2400 organizations joining (as of the time of writing).

The MSF is not a standards development organization. No standards will be generated by this group, however as an organization that’s barely over a year old it has garnered over 2700 industrial members, a rather astonishing number. Although independent of the Khronos Group the MSF shares many members, infrastructure and the President of both organizations is the same person. A good example of the success of coordination efforts is the effort to create tools to enable the interchange of glTF and USD, an ongoing effort. USD, a proprietary format originally developed by Pixar, is moving towards OUSD (open USD) under the auspices of the Alliance for Open USD (AOUSD). At some point I would expect USD to move through the ISO standardization process.

The MSF Standards Register is a particularly important project in the MSF which: “The Metaverse Standards Register (MSR) is a publicly-accessible, searchable register of all pre-qualified organizations and groups (POGs) and any standards-related publications and projects (SPPs) relevant to Metaverse interoperability, including but not limited to formal and informal standards organizations, emerging, completed and adopted standards, standardization projects, specifications, guidelines, or open source projects.” It’s a terrific effort to gather together all the projects from notable groups working on the Metaverse.

 

What’s Your Country Doing?

Several countries have significant metaverse efforts. Following are links to these efforts.

Finland:

China:

United States:

Japan:

South Korea:

 

So You Want to Play in this Game?

So You Want to Play in this Game? If you’re an individual with expertise and the time to commit to participating in some standard’s development you will be able to participate, albeit with varying amounts of effort. Standards Development Organizations (SDO) have a myriad of options.

Let’s say you’re interested or have expertise in the technologies that comprise the Metaverse. Now what? If you work for a large company that is a member of one of the SDOs find your contact person, express interest and off you go. If you work for a small company or simply work for yourself, consider joining one of the SDOs that lets the public participate. If you want to participate in an SDO that requires membership, consider asking the SDOs about its levels of membership and fee structures. More interestingly if you are an expert in one of these technical domains, poke around the web sites and ask to become a technical advisor or expert and you may be asked to join.

The actual development of a technical standard is often driven by just a few people. Sure, there may be hundreds of people signed up to participate but it’s usually just a committed few that do the heavy lifting. Quite often, technical excellence and a willingness to do the hard work will afford you the opportunity to participate and make meaningful contributions to large efforts.

 

Conclusions

There is tremendous activity surrounding the Metaverse both from the pure technology point of view and from a standards development point of view. Surely the Metaverse will follow the usual hype cycle and if real uses can be found it will emerge from the “trough of disillusionment” to the “plateau of productivity”. But we are not there yet. Digital Twins, a subset of the Metaverse, is the first real use case and is gaining traction. Competing interests will push and pull the technology in a variety of directions. The large number of standard efforts can prove to be a deciding factor in how the technology evolves. This article is not meant to be a comprehensive detailing of all the standard’s activities but it is enough of a starter to get you moving in the right direction.

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