The rebranding of Facebook into Meta has opened up a real race to create the first fully functional metaverses. Fundamentally, there are two ideological approaches to this. 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 establishment of the digital parallel worlds.
To this end, the companies launched the Metaverse Standards Forum. The conglomerate includes tech giants such as Microsoft or Meta, game manufacturers such as Epic Games, but also corporations from other sectors of the economy 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 AR and VR technologies, for example, and thus make metaverses interoperable.
Interesting: despite prominent metaverse projects such as The Sandbox or Decentraland, you are looking for a representative from the crypto space in vain. However, the forum is open to everyone, according to the website.
Apple? Misreading
While the founding members come from a wide variety of industries, one company does not appear in the list, but the market observer attributes a future leadership role in the metaverse to Apple.
The tech giant is keeping a low profile on the topic of virtual worlds, but CEO Tim Cook revealed in January that they are dealing with “innovation” and “emerging technologies”. The word ”Metaverse” was not mentioned, but according to Bloomberg, Apple should work on its own headset, which should include both AR and VR elements. Market observers see this as a hint. However, there has not yet been an official presentation.
Such a move would put Apple in direct competition with Meta. The social media group turned the Metaverse into 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.
