News from the Metaverse Standards Forum

Hi,

As some of you may recall, W3C joined in June the Metaverse Standards 
Forum at its launch [1].

Since then, the Forum has been organizing itself to structure its work 
on "cooperation on interoperability standards needed to build an open 
and inclusive metaverse".

Francois (copied) and I have been keeping track of that and are making 
our best to represent W3C's angle in this.

Most recently, two so-called exploratory groups have been launched:
- 3D Asset Interoperability using USD and glTF Exploratory Group
- Real/Virtual World Integration Exploratory Group

Exploratory groups are a bit similar to how W3C Community Groups are 
sometimes used, in that they enable a group of interested parties to 
come together to figure out what a more formally chartered group could 
accomplish to help make progress on the said topics.

I've copied below the more detailed descriptions of these exploratory 
groups - if you feel the Immersive Web Working Group would like to bring 
specific input to these explorations, please let Francois and me know to 
make sure we convey it there. Naturally, each of you may also want to 
join the said groups directly in the Metaverse Standards Forum.

Thanks!

Dom

1. https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/9584

# 3D Asset Interoperability using USD and glTF Domain Exploratory Group 
Proposal

## Exploratory Group Scope
Build consensus and draft a proposed charter for a 3D Asset 
Interoperability Domain Working Group.

##  Potential Working Group Goals (and non-Goals) and Deliverables
The proposed charter would set out goals and key activities to generate 
insights into leading 3D interoperability initiatives and to foster 
their evolution to meet prioritized industry use cases. Special 
attention would be paid to opportunities for cooperation between USD and 
glTF to increase synergy and reduce duplication of effort, gaps, 
fragmentation and confusion, for the good of the industry.

Early examples of possible activities to be captured in the charter include:
● Investigations
   ○ Collect and organize metaverse use cases for real-time 3D asset 
interoperability, including authoring, delivery, and hybrid/integrated 
experiences including end-user created 3D content, individual assets,
and scene containers of assets. Explore the requirements for the scope 
of 3D assets from geometry and material to sound, physics, composition, etc.
   ○ Identify current capabilities and fitness-for-purpose of USD, USDZ, 
and glTF to meet these use cases. USD was originally designed for 
authoring and glTF was originally designed for delivery, and now
there appears to be interest for USD to be used for delivery and for 
glTF to add capabilities such as composition and behaviors.
   ○ Identify current material format capabilities including glTF PBR 
materials, USD materials, MaterialX, and MDL.
   ○ Identify the key subsets and roadmap gaps to advance USD and glTF, 
and enable robust authoring/delivery workflows using either USD or glTF 
or both in combination, e.g., USD distillation to glTF, USD to USD 
delivery, glTF re-mixing using USD-based tools
   ○ How do real-time use cases compare to offline use cases, and how 
may this evolve?
● Projects
   ○ Curate or create benchmarking assets to be made freely available, 
and to be used in the projects below
   ○ Prototype to understand USD and glTF performance and engineering 
complexity for delivery on a range of platforms
   ○ Survey and testing of format import and export robustness with key 
authoring tools
   ○ Prototype distillation of USD, including composed scenes and 
behaviors, to glTF/glXF
   ○ Prototype use of USD/glTF assets and behaviors in a wide variety of 
run-time engines, DCC tools, and the web, e.g., JavaScript and/or the DOM.
● Engagement
   ○ Collaborate with and complement existing USD and glTF open 
standards and open source efforts
   ○ Reach out to diverse engine vendors to experiment with benchmark 
assets and report back findings and issues

-----------------------

# Real/Virtual World Integration Domain Exploratory Group Proposal

## Exploratory Group Goals

This exploratory group will:
  ● Build consensus and draft a proposed charter for one or more 
Real/Virtual World Integration Domain Working Groups focusing on one or 
more of the topics mentioned below.
  ● Prioritize topics according to relevance, urgency and feasibility 
within the exploratory group.
  ● Specify concrete projects intended to result in running code/systems 
and demonstrations.

The Real/Virtual World Integration Domain Working Group will not define 
new standards but rather coordinate with existing SDOs where appropriate.

## Potential Working Group Goals and Deliverables
The scope of Real/Virtual World Integration includes:
  ● Definition of constructs describing the physical world (“reality”),
  ● Definition of constructs describing created content intended to 
represent or accompany entities in reality,
  ● Technical methods to integrate created (digital) content with reality.

This will mean examining technologies such as:
● Describing the real world
   ○ Semantic representations
     ■ OGC CityGML 3.0, BIM-IFC etc.
     ■ EU INSPIRE semantic models
     ■ support semantic translation between publication and application
   ○ Unique real-world identifiers (ex. URIs)
     ■ encode position, bounding volume, semantic type, disambiguation
     ■ find or define URI registers, distributed if feasible
   ○ OGC GeoPose 1.0
     ■ support transformation between publication and application 
spatial reference frames
     ■ support 6 degree-of-freedom geo-located poses
   ○ Digital Twins, IoT, WoT
     ■ Select, refine, or define efficient publish/subscribe protocols
     ■ Support federation of data from multiple vendors
     ■ Support harmonization of data from multiple sensor types [...]
     ■ Sensor ontologies (ex. https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-ssn/)
     ■ Web of Things (WoT) Architecture W3C Recommendation
     ■ ISO/IEC DIS 21823-1 Interoperability for Internet of Things 
Systems - Part 1: Framework

● Affecting the real world
   ○ OGC SensorThings API Part 2 – Tasking Core
   ○ IEEE 7007-2021 Ontological Standard for Ethically Driven Robotics 
and Automation Systems

● Positioning/Localization
   ○ Visual Positioning Services
     ■ API standards
     ■ Parameter encodings
     ■ Digital twin integration (common base data)
● Discovery of spatial services and experiences
   ○ Discover real-world spatial services (ex. visual positioning 
service, reality modeling or digital twin service)
   ○ Discover real-world spatial experiences
   ○ Integration with reality models or digital twins (ex. real-world URIs)
   ○ Integration with real-world spatial experience creation environments
   ○ Decentralized or federated

● Open reality modeling platform (like OpenStreetMap++)
   ○ Open platform for prototyping, R&D etc.
   ○ Open data via crowdsourcing
   ○ Extensible Semantic Model.
   ○ Automated geo-alignment of digital twins
   ○ Open visual positioning service
   ○ http://openhybrid.org/index.html

Received on Friday, 7 October 2022 08:35:35 UTC