Participants in the Metaverse Standards Forum include many
of the biggest companies working in the space, from chip makers to gaming
companies, as well as established standards-setting bodies like the World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C), the group said in an statement announcing its creation on
Tuesday.
Conspicuously missing from the member list for now however
is Apple, which analysts expect to become a dominant player in the metaverse
race once it introduces a mixed reality headset this year or next.
Gaming companies Roblox and Niantic also were not included
among the forum's participants, nor were emerging crypto-based metaverse
platforms like The Sandbox or Decentraland.
Apple has not yet publicly acknowledged plans for a headset,
although it has reportedly given its board a sneak peek of the product,
according to Bloomberg. It did not immediately respond to a request for comment
about the new metaverse forum.
Introducing such a device would put Apple in direct
competition with Meta, which has staked its future on the growth of the
metaverse and invested heavily in hardware to make its vision of interconnected
virtual worlds a reality.
Meta, known as Facebook until it changed its name as part of
its metaverse pivot last year, has disclosed plans for a mixed-reality headset
code-named Cambria to be released this year.
Apple has been heavily involved in creating web standards
such as HTML5 in the past. For three-dimensional content in the metaverse,
Apple worked with Pixar on the USDZ file format and with Adobe to ensure it
supported the format.
Neil Trevett, an executive at chip maker Nvidia who is
chairing the Metaverse Standards Forum, said in a statement to Reuters that any
company is welcome to join the group, including participants from the crypto
world.
The forum aims to facilitate communication between a variety
of standards organizations and companies to bring about "real-world
interoperability" in the metaverse, he said, without addressing how
Apple's absence would affect that goal. © Reuters
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