The Open Metaverse Foundation (OMF), launched last week by the Linux Foundation, was created to implement the protection and interoperability standards required to drive metaverse adoption at scale, according to Royal O’Brien, a Linux Foundation GM and the executive director of OMF.

The metaverse is in a state of buzz and varying opinions on adoption timelines, with some saying this year will be a proving one for its momentum, and others claiming the components needed won’t be in sync until later this decade.

OMF’s goals are to gather as many ecosystem players to catalyze that timeline under eight foundational interest groups (FIGs): users, transactions, digital assets, simulations and virtual worlds, artificial intelligence (AI), networking, security and privacy, and legal and policy.

The foundation is currently developing its narrative overview publicly and collaboratively on Discord, which it plans to wrap up by next week and start distributing to its FIGs.

O’Brien said the OMF's focus is developing the interoperable APIs and standards that will free data to move on and off of transports, a focus shared by TIP’s telecom metaverse group formed late last year to develop end-to-end network capabilities that can support the technology at scale.

According to O'Brien, the mechanism to achieve interoperability is the most important piece "because then you're not trying to solve the entire chain." The demarcation point for making the metaverse move forward, regardless of the end destination, is the capability to "ingress and egress data in a meaningful way" across open platforms.

In 2023, that may only look like “two cubes that can bounce a dot between two servers. But it's still 1,000 times further ahead if anybody could implement that in whatever engine or whatever technology stack they wanted to, or scale it in any way they can. We have to start somewhere,” O’Brien told SDxCentral.

Companies are battling for a dominant space in the metaverse when they should be aligning on interoperability, according to O’Brien. “You’re not supposed to try and disassemble other communities; you're actually supposed to work with them.”

With all the moving pieces of a movement still in its infancy, the intermediary connection between all of these is the most critical first step, he added, and the tech industry can develop all the standards in the world, but ultimately “code is king.”

“There's a ton of open-source [libraries] out there that [have] a lot of the capabilities,” but they need to to be “adjusted or glued together.” OMF is looking to provide that adhesive community, but while it stresses decentralization, it also wants to focus on a framework for parties with pre existing IP ownership to be able to protect it within the open metaverse, so common and ongoing concerns can be “moved towards standards that people can rely upon."

A lot of the open, moving metaverse will be dealing with digital asset control, permission models, and bridging systems allowing an individual's data to move between metaverses in an interoperable and at times decentralized way, added O’Brien.

O'Brien extended the hybrid concept into the broader misconception of a single metaverse as well, saying like private and public telecom networks, there will be portable, decentralized data moving between virtual worlds as well as centralized data anchored to a specific world [or worlds] within the metaverse.

One of the challenges already clear to O’Brien and the industry at large is the network requirements needed to scale the applications.

Analysys Mason’s Martin Scott told SDxCentral that scalable compute and really low-latency processing all happening in the cloud is the critical fusion needed to start actually making the use cases possible. But there is still a long way to go before network infrastructures can support the applications that demonstrate real enterprise value.

O’Brien noted, “right now, the average web page is six megs in size, after we get some images, JavaScript, HTML,” but looking at “metaverse-type experiences,” demand moves up to anywhere from 20 megabytes to “north of 300” in immersive applications.

“That's a 50-times payload of network stress … so now you gotta start thinking, how's that going to work for edge caching? How's it going to work for replication? Who's going to pay for it? How do I incentivize people that are on the network to contribute some of their CPU and network in this model? Because that's a lot of money really fast,” he said.

O'Brien is not alone in insisting the incentive is there for telecom operators. Citigroup estimates a whopping $13 trillion value in metaverse-related revenue to be generated by 2030, and O'Brien believes cost savings from applications like digital twins will also drive enterprise adoption.

Analysys Mason’s Scott told SDxCentral in an earlier interview that what makes the metaverse revolution fundamentally different from 3D gaming platforms already in existence is that it isn’t a closed system.

“By using standards, different parts of the metaverse are interconnected. They are near-infinitely scalable; content and assets are portable between different parts of the metaverse (subject to certain constraints [such as] regulation and appropriateness)," he said. "Those are the things that make the metaverse uniquely different from the virtual worlds that we see and engage with today.”