Mark Zuckerberg vision of a VR/AR reality with Internet or the basic and easy definition of the Metaverse and the basis of restructuring from Facebook as the mothership to be another subsidiary in its 2021 surprising announcement.
If you wanted a test on how the tech market is reacting to former Facebook Inc., now Meta Platforms vision for the future of the Internet under a Metaverse, well…
Ask 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, the Web3D Consortium, the World Wide Web Consortium, and the XR Association (XRA) will tell you they are up to it.
The latter is a list of ALL MEMBERS of the Metaverse Standards Forum which practically opens the formal adoption of a Metaverse standard that many of the tech industry will follow or "everyone speaking a same language".
Besides the first draft of the standard definition, the Forum focus will be on “pragmatic, action-based projects” like hackathons and open source tooling and while being a selective group, have more members coming aboard.
I am indeed surprised by the participation of Microsoft, Epic Games, Sony, Adobe, W3C and the absence of Google.
Microsoft is struggling with its HoloLens approaches all right, but the project has been invested and researched heavily to just hand over the lead to Meta and the case of Epic Games and Sony, is that both company are seeing how Epic Games can actually have their own Metaverse and Sony obviously backing up momentarily.
Adobe probably was in a good position to have a Metaverse on its own as its content creation portfolio grants them the position already and the World Wide Web Consortium's involvement amaze me they are even interested in video, virtual and augmented reality being a new thing for the Internet at all.
Google's nowhere to be seen here makes me wonder what could have happened with their association with Khronos, which had their own VR forum and now they are part of the Metaverse Standards Forum.
For those who are still not getting it and a easy explanation, imagine those big event like concert and movies that were showcase on Fortnite a while ago, now, picture yourself being playing that exact scenario in Fortnite via VR and the environment ant the reac of "your hands" (via controller), that is the easy way to explain Metaverse as of now.