The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations specialised agency for information and communication technologies, has established an expert focus group to work towards international technical standards for the metaverse.
The group aims to develop a roadmap for setting technical standards to make metaverse services and applications interoperable, enable a high-quality user experience, ensure security, and protect personal data.
“The metaverse and its layers of technologies can help human development and progress,” says ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin.
“The work of this ITU focus group is the first step in ensuring that these technologies work well and that they work for all. The benefits of the metaverse should be shared broadly and equitably, and the risks should be well understood and addressed.”
“Standards development must be driven by everyone that will rely on the resulting standards,” says Seizo Onoe, director of the ITU Telecommunication Standardidation Bureau.
“This focus group will support our work together to envision technology use cases for the metaverse, determine the associated technical requirements, and develop standards that help meet these requirements on a global scale.”
ITU brings together a global membership of 193 member states and over 900 member companies, universities, and international and regional organisations to work on issues such as technical standardisation.
The metaverse focus group will be active for one year and will conduct “pre-standardisation” work as a basis for developing new ITU standards.
ITU Publishes New 2020 Guidelines for Protecting Children Online
