Standards are not the issue. Content is. There is no metaverse; just a lot of empty rooms and walled gardens with not a lot of compelling stuff to do in them. A

Standards are not the issue. Content is. There is no metaverse; just a lot of empty rooms and walled gardens with not a lot of compelling stuff to do in them. All the content is where the people and the audience with money are, which is the walled gardens provided by Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Google, etc. Then there are various social platforms. News, games, etc. All vaguely connected and accessible via this thing called "the internet" which despite the fact that is half a century old at this point is still a surprisingly loosely defined something. Creating more standards just adds more empty rooms. It's the content problem that needs to be solved. There's this notion that "the metaverse" is going to require special hardware, special software, etc. Of course many of us have been playing 3D games on 2D screens just fine for the last few decades. Adding goggles to the mix makes some of those games a bit more immersive of course but mostly they work fine without the goggles as well. It's not clear to me that the metaverse actually requires new hardware. Which raises the question why we don't have it (whatever it is, which is a relevant thing that people seem to be asking). A lot of those games are multiplayer and basically involve people socializing for large amounts of time. I never really engaged with world of warcraft but I know multiple people that spend enormous amounts of time on that and other games. Is that "the metaverse"? Maybe. It's definitely an escape from reality for some. Is doing the same with some VR goggles going to be massively different? Some people probably already do that. If you stop focusing on hardware and formfactor and just ask the question if having the same stuff that we have today (aka. the Internet), but with AR/VR goggles is actually worth having, the answer is probably going to be no. That's the problem. Either we have the meta verse already and it's a bit underwhelming or we don't really have it just yet because it hasn't actually been invented yet. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is 30 years old now and actually predates much of what we now are used to. His recent books are also quite nice and features some updated musings on what the internet used to be and could become. E.g. "Fall, or Dodge in Hell", published three years ago or so, features blockchains, ar goggles, post truth society, people using bots to spread misinformation and drive political (and other) agendas, and a few other things. It paints a pretty dystopian near future (or even present day). But no Metaverse. A nice observation in that book is that "the internet" stopped being a special thing when multiple generations had grown up with it and mostly a term used by older generations that actually still remembered a world without it. That would be us.