Microsoft, Facebook, and Others Are Founding a Metaverse Open Standards Group (theverge.com) 32
Microsoft, Epic Games, Meta, and 33 other companies and organizations have formed a standards group for "metaverse" tech. The Metaverse Standards Forum is supposed to foster open, interoperable standards for augmented and virtual reality, geospatial, and 3D tech. From a report: According to a press release, the Metaverse Standards Forum will focus on "pragmatic, action-based projects" like hackathons and prototyping tools for supporting common standards. It's also interested in developing "consistent terminology" for the space -- where many players can't even agree on what a "metaverse" is. In addition to the companies above, the group's founding members include major pre-metaverse entities like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Nvidia, Qualcomm, Sony Interactive Entertainment, and Unity, in addition to newer ones like Lamina1, a blockchain payments startup co-founded by Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson.
Most likely, (Score:2)
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A standard way to monetize and maximize advertising opportunities.
Given the negative connotations already surrounding social media in general, this is more likely aligning Greed to ensure Meta Precious remains a viable and legal mind-altering highly-addictive digital designer dru, er, I mean consumer product, especially for the most valuable target audience.
Your children.
Elect better leaders if you don't like it, because you're certainly not going to escape it on this planet outside of a Third World.
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A standard way to monetize and maximize advertising opportunities.
Yep. In return for being part of the gang they have to ensure they don't have any freeloaders and minimum fees for all sales.
It can't be a monopoly because... look at how many companies do the same thing!
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It can't be a monopoly because... look at how many companies do the same thing!
I wonder if we can figure out a legal framework for this, or whether it should be illegal for companies to come together to form a de facto monopoly by colluding.
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Yes, and that's proof that none of them really "get it" and it's also why in the long run they will fail at this. They'll try to force it, capitalize on short-term hype, gamble on long-term profits, pollute all the usability with greed, and eventually customers will flee to somewhere else.
So what is actually being added? (Score:2)
Geospatial and positioning applications have been all kinds of popular for decades; even if the output ended up being rendered to boring old screens rather than fancy VR go
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You're missing the most important reason why they want standardization.
So they can push ads on you on every platform at any moment.
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Oh god the conspiracy theories are getting tired. Listen kid, competitors don't work together to let other companies in on their ad revenue.
Find a more intelligent bullshit conspiracy.
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Oh you sweet summer child :)
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They know that each of the other ones is strong and big enough to actually compete with them for the ad cake.
But if they come together and set a price tag, while at the same time ensuring that anyone else would be so insignificant to the ad companies that advertising with them is essentially pointless because you could only reach like 1/10th of the audience, if that, they dictate what price you have to pay to advertise.
It's sensible to collude with your 2 actual competitors to cut out everyone else that cou
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That's likely part of the spec. The other parts are to ensure the barrier to entry is far too high for any pesky startups to get involved. Gotta keep this club as exclusive as possible. We don't want infrastructure in the metaverse to turn into something usable by the masses without a monetary pathway straight to the big players. No sir.
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I am hopeful they are realizing that if everyone has "their own metaverse" that operates on a proprietary engine with bespoke content formats and protocols the whole thing kind of falls apart.
This isn't like an MMO where game mechanics and world design are entirely distinct from the others, people won't buy in if they are vendor locked because of the headset they bought. The metaverse really needs to be actually "the metaverse" as in singular if this thing has any hope of working.
Doesn't make it any less b
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but what 'metaverse' things do people have in mind for which there isn't some degree of standardization already
How well does Android receive iMessages? How well does Telegram work with WhatsApp? Make no mistake unless there is, a) a standard everyone agrees with and, b) a standard all parties sign up to, you may as well not have a standard at all.
Just because we all know how to do something doesn't mean that they will do something if a standard doesn't lead them down the path. This Metaverse bullshit has real money in it, everyone is going to look to corner the market with some proprietary lock-in crap.
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I would think perhaps something on the level of HTML, WWW and web services for chat, object exchange (perhaps blockchains can have an actual use case here?) etc, but for 3d environments (I loathe the Metaverse moniker). VRML never really caught on afaik, but the timing and available technology is different now.
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The same claims were made just before the the web was declared "open for business" with http being the only identifiable framework. They had nothing but a pledge to define open standards. This is just an extension of the world wide web. User demand driven development is so commie... I'm kidding.
Regulate competition out of the market (Score:2)
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I'm still trying to get people to call it the "metastasis". It's fitting. Not only is it "Cancer 2.0", it's also ensuring that no new development can happen and that it will remain static for as long as they can milk it.
typical behavior (Score:2)
Rather than authentic open standards by unaffiliated people, we get the usual industry suspects ganging up to declare their own standard. Open it will never be.
Is this the next VRML or X3D? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, it's nice to have standards and one more won't hurt.
With that said, I remember when VRML & later X3D were introduced with all bells and whistles about Virtual reality in the browser... really cool stuff
But today, they remains niche technology... I am wishing them success but at least for now I am not yet seeing mass adoption. At least for now , metaverse path pretty much looks like a re-run of what happened with second life with better technology (which again is really cool and I do hope they succeed)
ie... at least for now, the concept is still a bit too meta for the masses
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Ah yes, those were the days! I was pretty active in Blaxxun's Cybertown, where you could build your own 3d worlds and avatars in VRML (including your own animations), and hang out there with other users.
I'm not sure how things have advanced much beyond that today, except for better graphics and bandwidth.
Meanwhile in the universe.. (Score:2)
We're all trying to figure out food and housing, and our giant billionaire tech moguls are still dreaming up even more meta-garbage.
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Yes yes, the real world has problems therefore any effort on anything that isn't directly those problems is a waste of time and effort. Good thing there are people who don't think like that, or you'd be out of a job and we wouldn't have things like the internet.
Is it how it all started? (Score:2)
The Matrix has you...
Follow the white rabbit...
Knock knock, Neo_
And as usual (Score:2)
Apple is not part of that list. Were they even contacted? Did they refuse? Did they ask for something specific before agreeing to join?
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And I will continue to not waste my time on any of Facebooks, Microsofts, or Apples virtual turfs.
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An Epic stance. You Apple haters are Unreal.
Test of success (Score:2)
If you can't walk from Diablo into Animal Crossing into Alyx into MyHomadeSimWorld,
they've failed.
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Why would someone want to "walk" between any of those games? The aesthetics and target audiences are very different for Diablo and Animal Crossing, just to take two in your list. Don't expect to keep your avatar and weapons when you jump into animal crossing. Maybe your friend list could be shared. But why would the game developers want to spend resources to allow that?
Maybe an educational game would have links to other educational things. Or the metaverse equivalent of a blog would have links to whatever.