Meta, Microsoft and Co. are working on an industry standard

Facebook’s rebranding as Meta has created a real race to create the first fully functional Metaverse. Basically there are two opposing ideological approaches. Community driven vs. corporate driven, decentralized vs. centralized, crypto vs. corporations. The latter now want to join forces and create a uniform industry standard for the construction of digital parallel worlds.

Metaverse Standards Forum

That’s what the companies called it for Metaverse Standards Forum into life. The conglomerate includes tech giants like Microsoft or Metagame makers like EpicGamesbut also corporations from other economic sectors such as IKEA. A total of 37 companies belong to the organization. Together they want to focus on “pragmatic, action-oriented projects” in order to create uniform standards, for example for AR and VR technologies, and thus make metaverses interoperable.

Interesting: a representative from the crypto space is sought despite prominent Metaverse projects such as The sandbox or Decentraland vain. However, the forum is open to everyone, it says on the website.

Apple? none

While the founding members hail from a wide variety of industries, one company doesn’t make the list, but market observers credit it with a future leadership role in the metaverse – Apple.

The tech giant is keeping a low profile on the topic of virtual worlds, but CEO Tim Cook hinted in January that it was dealing with “innovation” and “emerging technologies.” The word “metaverse” was not mentioned, Bloomberg according to Apple, however, is working on its own headset that should contain both AR and VR elements. Market observers take this as a pointer. However, there has not yet been an official presentation.

With such a move, Apple would be in direct competition with Meta. The social media group made the Metaverse a prestige project and has since invested billions in research and development. However, it remains to be seen to what extent a new competitive situation could arise here.