Η Apple is not among the founding members of a standards forum for the "metaverse", which includes Meta, Microsoft, Sony, Epic Games, Nvidia, Adobe and others.
"The Metaverse Standards Forum brings together companies and organisations to promote alignment with the requirements and priorities for interoperability standards and accelerate their development through pragmatic action-based projects." said a press release.
It aims to enable communication between a wide range of organisations and companies to give the metaverse "real-world interoperability" and to help different visions of the metaverse to work together.
The over 35 founding members include 0xSenses, Academy Software Foundation, Adobe, Alibaba, Autodesk, Avataar, Blackshark.ai, CalConnect, Cesium, Daly Realism, Disguise, the Enosema Foundation, Epic Games, the Express Language Foundation, Huawei, IKEA, John Peddie Research, Khronos, Lamina1, Maxon, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAR Cloud, the Open Geospatial Consortium, Otoy, Perey Research and Consulting, Qualcomm Technologies, Ribose, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Spatial Web Foundation, Unity, VerseMaker, Wayfair, Web3D Consortium, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and XR Association.
Apple, it seems, is not on the list of members, despite its large investment and continued involvement with devices in the AR and VR space. Apple has been actively involved in creating standards in the past, such as HTML5 for the web. It created Thunderbolt with Intel and the "USDZ" file format for 3D content with Pixar and Adobe. More recently, Apple participated in the development of Matter at WWDC 2022, a new open standard for smart home accessories.
Game companies Roblox and Niantic, as well as crypto-based metaverse platforms such as The Sandbox and Decentraland, are also not included in the Metaverse Standards Forum. As participation is free and at no cost, we may see them all in the future.
