You will have heard about the metaverse by now. It seems like every tech company is vying for a piece of this bland pie. Meta Platforms, the original baker, along with other major tech companies, are all banding together to form the Metaverse Standards Forum. It will ensure nothing metaverse-related goes on without their knowledge. Oh, and to also foster the development of industry standards and so on.
Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Huawei, Ikea(?), and 31 other companies make up the forum so far. But, curiously, Apple, one of the largest companies in the world, is not on that list.
Apple needs to speak up
That could be partly because Apple is working on its own metaverse, with blackjack, and hookers a VR headset of some sort still in the works. We’ve heard nary a peep from Apple about that but, according to Bloomberg, its board members have already seen an early version.
Also absent from the list are gaming companies, like Roblox and Niantic. Both of these already seem to be heading towards the looming virtual future. Cryptocurrency-focused companies and projects like Decentraland or The Sandbox are also nowhere to be seen. But that’s kinda expected given how things look right now. They’re probably being talked down from a ledge. Which is on the blockchain, for some reason.
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The idea behind the formation of yet another corporate group chat is similar to that of the World Wide Web Consortium. It should allow these companies some interoperability between their different metaverses. It’ll (hopefully) get them to agree on which standards will be used. You can’t have everyone else using .PNG files when Microsoft is still on .JPEG, to use a very crude example.
As nice as this must be for the companies involved, it reminds us of the gatekeeping ‘cool table’ at primary school. If you don’t fit in, then you’re out. Speaking to that, Neil Trevett of Nvidia, the chairperson of the forum, said in a statement to Reuters that any company is welcome to join the group, even those from the crypto world. It’ll be interesting to see how this affects the little guys with a cool idea. Like Apple. We’re sure that iMetaverse will be lovely, once it’s eventually revealed.
Source: Reuters