METAVERSE STANDARDS: WHAT IS NEEDED FROM OUR NEW SOCIETY?

Metaverse development has been increasing rapidly as more and more companies are investing money into this space. Financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have been building product management departments in order to incorporate NFT applications to their systems and gaming companies such as Decentraland and Unity have been creating the infrastructure and real estate behind hosting such a world. But as this development continues to accelerate, standards to define the Metaverse must be outlined so that there are open standards that guide the development in tandem.
Recently, the Metaverse Standards Forum has been formed to define such open standards for the industry. Companies such as Meta, Epic Games, and 34 other companies formed this group, with its mission being “…the Metaverse Standards Forum provides a venue for cooperation between standards organizations and companies to foster the development of interoperability standards for an open and inclusive metaverse, and accelerate their development and deployment through pragmatic, action-based projects.” With it being pragmatic and action based, the forum is allowing members and the community to better improve the space and bring light to flaws through hackathons, plugfest, and open source tooling.”
With this in mind, I will highlight some key questions that must be addressed in order to have a functioning digital society. Much like our IRL society, definitions and laws have been put in place to allow for some form of structure.

• What is the metaverse?
• How is it safe for users?
• How to monitor harassment or even illegal activity?
• How is data transferred across platforms?
• What is your metaverse identity and is it constant throughout other platforms?

Despite the desire for decentralization in the Web3 movement, some definitions and guidelines must be in play in order to optimally make use of the platform. Most importantly is identity. Video games see this in some form with the use of usernames/avatars. While the username may stay the same across games, the avatar changes. Assets in other games cannot be cross played, so a skin in one game cannot be utilized in another. As NFT APIs become more popular and begin to plug in to these worlds, being able to transfer across platforms is important to take the metaverse up to the next level.