Linux Foundation establishes Open Metaverse Foundation for open-source metaverse

“We’re still in the early days of the vision for an open metaverse, and we recognize that many open-source communities and foundations are working on vital pieces of this iterative puzzle,” said Royal O’Brien, executive director of the Open Metaverse Foundation.

The Open Metaverse Foundation has set up eight Foundational Interest Groups (FIGs) to focus on different aspects of the metaverse. These groups include users, transactions, digital assets, simulation and virtual worlds, artificial intelligence, networking, security and privacy, and legal and policy. Each distributed group will work independently on targeted disciplines for developing advanced projects and scalable technologies.

“The Cloud Native Computing Foundation looks forward to contributing its deep expertise to evolve cloud technologies and infrastructure in tackling these challenges,” said Taylor Dolezal, head of ecosystem, Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “Together, we’ll build a truly open, accessible virtual world, where anyone can participate.”

One of the key criticisms of companies like Facebook (Meta) that are intending to build virtual worlds is that these projects will be closed ecosystems and not a true metaverse. The Open Metaverse Foundation aims to bring together a community of developers, engineers, and academic leaders to address complex issues involved in building an open metaverse. The goal is to use open-source software and standards to create a portable metaverse with interoperability for scalable adoption. The different components of a metaverse, such as digital assets, simulations, transactions, AI, networking, security, and privacy will serve as the foundation of building an open metaverse.

“The LF Edge and Networking communities are well suited to deliver the open-source technologies defined by the Open Metaverse Foundation,” said Ranny Haiby, CTO, Networking, Edge and Access Technologies at the Linux Foundation. “We are looking forward to close collaboration with the new Foundation and foresee many potential synergies between it and our projects.”

In the past year, the Linux Foundation announced the addition of a new code base hosted by AgStack Project to provide community access to field boundary data. The project uses AI and computer science to create and manage international agricultural field boundary data.

Analysis

The Linux Foundation’s new effort has flown a bit under the radar but marks an important effort toward building a truly interoperable metaverse. Amidst massive layoffs at tech companies, Facebook’s multi-billion bet on metaverse technologies is likely to be impacted. Reports of cuts at Microsoft’s mixed reality units and another in a long line of delays for Apple’s AR/VR efforts are another sign that the over-excitement around metaverse technology is going to curtail development in 2023.

The positive side of this is projects such as Open Metaverse Foundation that share development costs will have more time to mature and have an impact.

Article Topics

Apple  |  AR/VR  |  Facebook  |  industry standards  |  Linux Foundation  |  Meta  |  metaverse  |  Microsoft  |  Open Metaverse Foundation  |  open source