Why building the metaverse is going to be an ‘exciting ride’

The metaverse will disrupt our lives – its development should not be taken lightly.

Its construction should not be rushed by a few companies; it must be careful, calculated, thoughtful and, above all, collaborative.

This was the main conclusion of a panel discussion on the technical standards and building blocks of the metaverse during this week MetaBeat event.

“If you’re creating something big that involves many parties in the world, it’s essential that you have good standards to build on; otherwise it won’t be a success,” said Rev Lebaredian, VP of Omniverse and Simulation Technology at Nvidia.

The starting point is the Khronos group is an open, non-profit consortium that develops, publishes and maintains royalty-free interoperability standards for 3D graphics, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), parallel computing, vision acceleration and machine learning (ML).

In June, the group founded the Metaverse Standards Forum [subscription required]. The trigger, Khronos President Neil Trevett explained, was the widespread confusion around standards. Organizations basically came to Khronos for guidance and said, “Community of standards, take care of it yourself,” he said.

The goal was to create a forum where the many ad-hoc standard groups that are formed can communicate and coordinate, he said. It started with 37 contributing companies – and after just a few months, 1,800 companies are now involved.

“That indicates that there is a genuine interest, a genuine interest and need to engage with the standards community, and a willingness to participate,” Trevett said.

The forum is now dividing into working groups, he explains.

Ultimately, the effort will provide a “big input funnel for expertise, a large output board for visibility.”

Developing standards is undoubtedly difficult, Lebaredian acknowledged. There is always controversy and politics. But, he noted, in the early days of the web, standards came about because people collaborated to create protocols like HTTP and HTML.

“Without standards, the metaverse just isn’t possible,” he said.

What’s happening now is “exactly analogous” to the evolution of the web: It took off because it was available to everyone, Lebaredian said.

“The metaverse is the web of these virtual worlds, our equivalent of an experience, a 3D spatial thing,” he said.

Everyone must join in and contribute to expand the metaverse. Without standardization, only a small group of people will build it, which will limit its size and value.

“I just don’t see any way this can exist if we don’t start from scratch with” interoperability standards,” he said.

Given the technology and amount of content needed to make the metaverse a reality, “no company could do it all,” he said. “No matter how big you are, you are not big enough”

Pervasive Growth

It’s also important for organizations to proceed slowly and cautiously — not to get ahead of things, Trevett stressed. For example, the builders of the metaverse can learn from the history of the web by trying to bring 3D to the masses.

Early platforms tried to define too much, such as runtime behavior, which was just getting off the ground at the time and changing quickly. One of the early successes, he pointed out, was OpenGL for Embedded Systems, a computer graphics rendering API for 2D and 3D graphics that was originally released in July 2003.

Then WebGL was released in 2011 — and it’s worked because it’s low-end, Trevett said — and Vulkan didn’t ship until 2016.

Likewise, it is important not to confuse the market; for example, he pointed to the rivalry between DVDs and Blu-Ray that slowed the evolution of home viewing technology.

For the metaverse to work, “it has to work everywhere,” Trevett said, with capabilities on any device. The technology needs to come out ubiquitously, which he says is “no trivial task, no small feat.”

Brace yourself for an exciting ride

We also need to recognize that it will constantly evolve and change, Lebaredian said — just like the Internet. “The Web didn’t quite end up where we hoped it would in 1993, 1994,” he said, pointing out that big players are still competing with each other and startups are constantly disrupting the space. Geopolitical forces must also be taken into account.

The metaverse is the “most computationally challenging computer science problem of all time,” Lebaredian said.

Trevett predicted that the first wave of standards will be around “hot topic” areas, including ID, geospatial capabilities, avatars and 3D asset formats (including Universal Scene Description and gITF.

Overarching principles will include free and fair competition, privacy and ethics, he said. Many also agree that some sort of decentralized ID will be needed, but it’s still unclear how that will pan out.

“Building a whole ecosystem — it can be a really exciting ride,” Trevett said. But “you have to be patient”.