By Katie Paul

(Reuters) – Meta, Microsoft and other tech giants rushing to build on the emerging concept of the metaverse have formed a group to promote the development of standards that would make companies’ nascent digital worlds compatible with each other. others.

Metaverse Standards Forum attendees include many of the biggest companies working in the field, from chipmakers to video game companies, as well as established standards organizations such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the group said. .

However, Apple is conspicuously absent from the list at the moment, and analysts expect it to become dominant in the Metaverse race once it introduces a mixed reality headset this year or next.

Gaming companies Roblox and Niantic were also not among the forum participants, nor were emerging cryptocurrency-based metaverse platforms like The Sandbox or Decentraland. Apple has yet to publicly acknowledge its plans for a headset, although it did give the board a preview of the product, according to Bloomberg. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the creation of the metaverse forum. The introduction of such a device will put Apple in direct competition with Meta, which has staked its future on the growth of the Metaverse and invested heavily in hardware to realize its vision of interconnected virtual worlds.

Apple has been heavily involved in creating web standards such as HTML5 in the past. For three-dimensional content in the Metaverse, Apple worked with Pixar on the “USDZ” file format and with Adobe to provide support for the format.

Neil Trevett, an executive at chipmaker Nvidia who chairs the Metaverse Standards Forum, said in a statement to Reuters that any company is welcome to join the group, including participants from the cryptocurrency world.

The forum aims to facilitate communication between a variety of standards organizations and businesses to bring “real-world interoperability” to the metaverse, he said, without addressing how the lack of ‘Apple will affect this goal.