Why Establishing Standards Will Be Key to the Metaverse’s Future with Neil Trevett - Step into the Metaverse podcast: EP26

Good day everyone and welcome to the Step into the Metaverse podcast. My name is Marc Van Reimenam and I'm also known as the Digital Speaker. I'm a future tech strategist and I think about how emerging technologies change organizations and society.

This podcast is part of my new.

Book called Step into the how the Immersive Internet Will Unlock a Trillion Dollar Social Economy. The book is available as an ebook, hard copy and audiobook. As part of this book, I did nearly 100 in depth interviews with the stakeholders involved in creating the open Metaverse, the investors, the developers, the artists, the collectors, etc. And I've turned a selection of these interviews into this podcast as I think that these conversations are too valuable to leave them on my computer. In this interview, I interviewed Neil Trevette. Neil is the Vice President of Developer Ecosystems at Nvidia, where he is responsible for enabling and encouraging advanced applications to use GPU acceleration. Neil is also serving as the elected President of the Kronos Group where he created and chaired the OpenGL ES working group that defined the industry standard for 3D graphics on mobile devices. In 2022, he became the Chair of the Metaverse Standards Forum, which offers a venue for cooperation between standard organizations and companies to foster the development of interoperability standards for an open and inclusive Metaverse, as well as accelerate their development and deployment through pragmatic action based projects. During the interview we discussed the importance of standards and how we can achieve them. We discussed the need for an open metaverse and what we need to do to achieve that, and we covered how we can keep our data private in the Metaverse. Enjoy the conversation.

So can you share a bit about the background of what you do, the Chronos Group, and how you are involved in the Metaverse?

Sure. So my day job is at Nvidia. I do developer ecosystems there. But no, I'm here primarily I think representing Kronos today. So Kronos is an open standards organization. We've been around 20 years. We have over 180 members. As you know, every standards organization has a particular focus. Ours is 3D graphics and low level APIs and file formats for 3D, which is our primary focus, but also vision processing, machine learning, parallel computation, basically tapping developers into the power of hardware acceleration. So we have things like OpenGL and Vulcan GLTF and GLTF is a file format that I think is getting a lot of interest in the in the Metaverse space. But it turns out a lot of the stuff we've been doing for years is perfect for the metaverse. So we just didn't realize it until now.

I guess that makes sense. Well, thank you for that. So, question I ask everyone before I start and I've received 84 different answers now. What is the metaverse according to you?

Yeah, everyone has a different answer. I was thinking about it. It's essentially the spatial web, but if I have a sentence, I will carry on, sometimes with persistence, sometimes with real world registration, and sometimes with reflection of real world state. So it's kind of the VR use case, the AR use case and the digital twin use case.

But.

But it's all basically on top of the foundation of the concept of a spatial web.

Yeah. And then related to that. So the spatial web. Are you then really reflective, referring to Web3, the decentralized components of whatever that comes with Web3?

Yeah, I think with lots of the discussion around Web3. Absolutely. No, it's relevant, as you say. No, the decentralized, the fact you're building in trust into the web. On top of everything that we have, we've developed Web one, Web two.

All good.

I think the metaverse does bear a lot of similarity to the characteristics of the current web. So I do think it will be an evolution rather than a whole new thing built from the ground up.

Yeah. So an evolution instead of a revolution.

Yeah, I think so.

But then I guess, you know, the spatial web, of course consists of various technologies. I guess with the metaverse you sort of see this convergence of all the different technologies. You know, 5G, Internet of Things, AI, blockchain, AR, VR, everything sort of comes together with the metaverse. But then how do we make this all work? Because if you have different. Everyone comes from a different perspective, but how do we make sure that everything then is. Is able to operate and cooperate with each other?

Yeah, it's a great question and kind of jumping forward to one of your questions. What does the future of the metaverse look like? I think the answer to that is the key to my personal view, which is it's going to look Darwinian. The one thing I'm absolutely sure of, it's the metaverse is not going to be created like Ready Player One. Let's hope not to one company, in fact, one programmer sold everything and we would wake up with the metaverse one morning. It's not going to happen like that. So it's going to be a Darwinian mix of proprietary technologies, awesome R and D standards, open source projects, all kind of in healthy Darwinian competition with each other. And the winning strategies will gradually get sifted out in the evolutionary style. And it's going to therefore be a bottom up exercise rather than a top down exercise, I believe. And the grassroots activities, people trying different things and the winners winning and hopefully winning for the right reasons value to end users, hopefully that will win through and gradually it will evolve and then 10 years down the line we'll say, wow, we kind of have come a long way towards what we were calling the metaverse back then.

Yeah, I guess so. Related to that. And what's your idea of the closed walled gardens, such as meta creating the data collection? That's related to that? What are your thoughts on that versus a more open metaverse?

You can't force openness. Again, it comes back to Dominionism. The openness has to earn its right to exist through adding value. And we'll get to standards in a moment. But standards and technologies are going to create this foundation for people to try all kinds of different technologies and business models. Some of them will be open, some of them will be closed. Many know the Wall Garden people will try everything and the ones that gather momentum again, hopefully through the right reasons will win out over time. Personally, I'm a big believer in openness, but again, you can't mandate people to be open. So I'm sure there's going to be a whole diversity of different environments and places to go, products to sell, using the foundational technology, pieces of the metaverse and see what works and what doesn't.

Yeah, makes sense. And so with the metaverse, how important is identity and reputation and think it relates to that comes also the interoperability, because otherwise you can't really take your reputation or your identity from one platform to the other. How important is that?

It's going to be super important. And that's kind of one of the things that we're working on at kronos with the 3D asset formats. If you're going to sustain the disbelief that the metaverse is kind of this place, you need persistence and you need to be able to take your stuff with you.

Right.

Else it's just disconnected stuff that doesn't have any bearing on each other. So there are lots and lots of problems to solve to make that vision come true. One of the more tenable ones that we can perhaps begin to solve quite quickly is okay, if you do have an avatar or you have a car or other assets and you've earned them maybe in one part of the metaverse and you want to take them to another part of the metaverse, how do we enable that kind of Asset portability between the different places. And that's something that we're beginning to work on at Kronos. And identity is part of that. One of the assets is your avatar and reputation and identity is going to be inextricably and actually probably more important in the end than the 3D graphics, the polygons you use to represent. So yeah, it's going to be essential.

So how do we enable this asset portability? Because you have, of course, you have the whole pipeline, NFTs, which could be an option to use that because you can prove ownership. But then again, if I have a metahuman heavy avatar, I can't really store that on the blockchain and then use the blockchain compute, because that doesn't really work. I think it's not powerful enough. How do we organize it?

Well, I think that this interoperability is where standards have to come in. Now, by standards, what is a standard? Right. So normally, in my experience, what people actually mean by a standard is an interoperability protocol, an agreement for two things to work together. It might be hardware to hardware, plug in your USB key. Purely software, you know, a server talking to a client. It can be anything. And in this case, a, a large part of the interoperability is going to be asset formats. And the information that are included in those asset formats, they have to be an agreed interoperability standards. So you can take it anywhere in the Metaverse. And the various pieces of software that are providing different experiences in different environments understand how to unpack and process and use that agreed data. So, but that's just one problem in the standards community. What we're finding and what we're seeing is the Metaverse. You said it yourself, there's going to be so many bits and pieces coming together. This is going to need interoperability at an unheard of scale. We thought getting the web to work was cool. Getting the spatial web to work is going to be super cool. And probably 100 times more things have to interoperate than we've tried to construct in a complex system before. So suddenly interoperability standards have become the new hotness. Well, it is cool. I was like, oh my God, everyone wants standards something. Because without interoperability, it's not going to work. My favorite phrase is we're going to need a constellation of standards and it's not going to be, I mean, Kronos, we can do one little piece, but there's going to be hundreds of standards organizations creating thousands of standards and they ideally all have to be coordinated. At least the ones that are adjacent in the technology space have to be coordinated. So from a standardization wonk point of view, this is kind of the biggest standardization effort I think that we've ever undertaken. So it's actually kind of pretty cool.

It's definitely cool and I hope we'll make it to get all those standards. But generally, I think the standards also take a lot of time to get developed. Everyone needs to agree with each other. We have all these standard bodies ISO is also working on there on the, for example, blockchain standards, smart contract standards, which is, I think, closely related to this. How on earth are we going to get all those thousands of standards today, not next month, if you understand what I mean.

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I get a lot. That standards are too slow. I do get that a lot. And sometimes, sometimes they do take too long. But I think to say that standards can never be a timely solution is to really miss the point of what you're trying to achieve through standardization. It's certainly easier and faster for one company to write a proprietary spec, get three people to sign off on it and to ship it out. You know, it's. You don't have to bring a whole industry along with you and get broad agreements from potentially hundreds of companies. But getting that agreement, it's not a bug, it's the feature. It's that process of building consensus as to what everyone is agreeing to do as an industry. That is the whole point now. The journey is the reward. It's building that consensus through culture and process and open company governance, getting to social wide scale, enabling every, all 7 billion of us to be metaverse enabled. Standards are absolutely, in my view, the fastest route. There's no other way we can do it and there's certainly no faster way to do it. But we do need the standard organizations to be on the ball and focusing on the right things and coordinating with each other. Else our Darwinian cycles are going to be longer than they need to be. So. And at Kronos, we're actually beginning to try to for. Because since the meta announcement, all the industry leaders have been paying lip service to open standards.

Yeah, yeah.

No one's actually doing anything. I mean, it's only been a few weeks, so. But Kronos is, we're reaching out to leader companies saying, would you be up for actually a coordination forum to actually make it tangible? Where do you go to coordinate with all these other standards organizations, which you may have never met? And Kronos, we're trying to Help by taking a leadership position and creating a forum that all the standards development organizations, SDOs, all the SDOs can come to and we can begin actual coordination rather than just talking about it. We'll see whether that idea takes off or not, but it's definitely needed. So far we've had very positive response. People saying, oh my God, somewhere I can go.

So I'm Dutch and Dutchies are known for seeking consensus in society. It's called Poldera and it's something that we've been doing for hundreds of years. I think it's a great format because you get a society where everyone eventually will agree with the right direction to move forward. But again, it also takes a lot of time. But then again, I guess to your point that, that it's still better to take the time than to have individual companies rushing forward and pushing through their proprietary mechanisms, I guess.

Well, actually that's an excellent point. You know that there's. If you boil it down to its essence, then there are three ways to actually get stuff technology out there, right? There is proprietary technology, people doing their own thing without needing to coordinate with anyone else. There is open standards that we've been talking about and of course there's open source too. And open source is a very powerful technique, but they all three are very different. And a lot of people get confused between open source and open standards. Open source is when everyone is agreeing to cooperate and share resources to create one implementation of a thing. An open standard is where you don't create the thing, you create the specification plus conformance tests for the thing. So you can get multiple companies using that thing in lots of different ways and lots of different markets. And then proprietary technology, the people doing their own thing. Proprietary technology is the best way of doing true cutting edge stuff. Stuff that no one's done before, no one really understands how to do. And I think there are elements of this in the Omniverse, for example. There's stuff in there that no one has tried to do before. And not just Nvidia, I mean, there's all kinds of other places too. I mean, we've learned the hard way, don't do that kind of activity, don't do R and D by committee, don't do that.

I think it's a good idea.

Yeah, theft by a thousand cuts. It doesn't work. So you need all three. And again, the Darwinian thing will sort out which. You need people to be out at the bleeding edge figuring out what's possible. And then once it becomes understood and people agree that this is needed and we just need to scale it out. That's when standards can really help. And if there are bits that we only need one implementation of, then open source can be fantastic. So we can need all three.

So, and I often in the conversation comes the idea of sort of two metaverses in the sense that you have a consumer and an enterprise version where the consumer is, you know, we play games, playing fun entertainment, concerts, sports, you know, that direction. And then you have the enterprise metaverse, which is sort of, you know, the collaboration, the meetings, the office space, but also the digital twins, smart cities, those kind of things. So when it comes to standards, how do you think that these will differ? Could they or should we aim for that they benefit from the same standards, or which direction do you think that will go?

Good question. I'm hoping, and I think it normally works out if you do a smart standard, it would be applicable to both. And I'm just thinking through the Kronos portfolio, for example, Vulcan, which is the new generation 3D API, gradually replacing OpenGL, that gets used just as easily in the gaming market and the professional market. You don't need a different way of driving the gpu because if you go look, and perhaps Kronos is in a fortunate position because we're low enough in the stack, we're kind of the lowest common denominator. What we do doesn't need to be too different for the different market segments. So. And if you can pull that off, that's an advantage because the evolution of 3D graphics is very interesting. You know, there were lots of companies like Silicon Graphics. I don't know if you remember back to the dinosaurs, Jurassic park dinosaurs, I mean, all big, big iron workstations costing hundreds of thousands of dollars got eaten. They all got eaten by PCs. And the thing that drove that was gaming. But now, you know, Nvidia was at the head of that charge. Nvidia was a gaming company at the beginning, but now if you look at the data center, it's all packed full of Nvidia GPUs. But that's all being fueled by, and is still being fueled by innovation in the gaming space. So if you can have common technology, you don't have to bifurcate into different markets, you can definitely benefit. You want to keep it together as much as you can. And a lot of what we're doing at the Kronos level, I think will be the same.

Yeah. So if we would have to look at like the next three to five years, what kind of standards if you could decide right now what standards we would have in the next five years, top three to five standards or so, what would you recommend or what would you say that these are the most important to focus on as a community, as a society?

I think, let me put the disclaimer. This is a kind of a Kronos centric view, but. So there are definitely other perspectives. But from the Kronos perspective, I think that the key things are firstly the asset formats. For the reasons you were just saying, it's an easy win, I think. Well, I'm sure it's not going to turn out to be that easy, but it's a potentially achievable win in that kind of timeframe. Three years is not very long, so. But we're not, it's not just one. We're going to need delivery formats, formats that my mum can use. Like she knows how to use a JPEG on her phone, right? I mean she doesn't know it's a jpeg, but she knows how to take a picture and she knows how to send me a picture on WhatsApp. Yeah. And GLTF is the equivalent of JPEG for 3D, so we need something like that, you know, but it's going to be 3D, so it's, you know, you need all the physics, you need the behaviors. What do I do when I push this object in the metaverse? Does it move? Dah dah dah dah stuff. And then we need a 3D authoring format and I think that's going to be USD, which is what Omniverse uses and it comes from Pixar. Awesome Heritage used to build movies. But my mum wouldn't have a clue how to use a workstation authoring system. Using USD. And USD is awesome for the authoring side, but it tends to be too big for it being the JPEG equivalent. So we need those two things. Then I think we're going to need APIs. Fortunately we have the 3D APIs already. I mentioned Vulcan Kronos is working on a virtual reality and augmented reality hardware API, which is OpenXR. So for the first time you can write a AR or VR app using a head mounted display of some sort. And you don't have to keep rewriting it for each different piece of hardware. I mean that's something close to the hardware that Chronos cares about. So I think those are the three things that we're working on and definitely we can have those in a good state within three years. But then of course, as we're saying there's a whole universe of stuff. There's. How do you represent digital twins? How do you represent that huge geospatial databases. I think GLTF will actually play a role there too. But you need an extra layer. You need all the economy stuff, crypto and all that whole universe you need. We're going to need lots of metadata standards. Sounds boring, but actually it's going to be one of the most challenging things. How do you define the properties of real life in all its complexity and distill it down into, you know, a man made environment? And there are lots of initiatives out there that have been working for years on defining metadata hierarchies.

I can imagine related to that, you would know. How do you find your stuff in the metaverse? You know, I think that's related to metadata. Find me a mountain, you know, or find me Mount Sufficius is already more details because there is at the moment, there is no Google Metaverse. If you have a spatial 3D environment, you know, that complicates of course you're finding your stuff. Yeah. To exponentially.

Yeah. And you want your stuff. When you put your stuff down in the metaverse and you come back a week later, still needs to be there in the same place. It kind of comes back to what I was saying. Now what's my sentence for the universe?

That.

That persistence is important and the real world registration is important. If you have AR glasses and you're using the metaverse to interact with the real world, know you need to be registered. So you need to know where you are. You need to know where your stuff is. Yeah. And you know all that. And there are standards organizations like you know, the Open Geospatial Consortium. They are the ones that Kronos knows 3D. Like we know Kung Fu, we know 3D geospatial consortium, they know mapping and positioning. So no, they have standards like geopos, which is coming, which is a way to very precisely define where you are on the earth, which is surprisingly complicated. It's a 300 page specification. But you need that kind of specificity if you're going to have the complexity of actually precisely defining where things are. It's not as simple as lat long. You need a lot more than that.

Yeah, that makes sense. And if we talk about the metaverse, we'll talk about extreme amounts of data that will be collected. How can standards help to keep data private? Or can they actually help that we own our own data, that we are in control of our own data and that no big tech can just, you know, use our data.

Yeah, I think that this is a really important one. We need to build security from the get go in this time around, not leave it as an afterthought like we did with the web, the current web. You know, we were constantly patching because it didn't have security in initial design. Right. We've been patching it ever since it got invented. We shouldn't do that again, let's build security and it's really important. Have you talked to Kent by yet? He's done the most insightful analysis of why we need security and he's kind of coming from the AR VR Hnd because it is scary. You know, my Android phone tracks me geographically, you know, and click on my links and clicks and stuff. But you put on a VR helmet, you are going to be an open book. Your health, your sexual preferences, your emotions on a second to second basis, all of this is going to be accessible to the service providers. We think being hacked today is scary. It would be really scary and very misusable. So we absolutely need security now. Can standards help? Yes, absolutely. Standards can provide the building blocks for the technical solution on how can we make something secure. But I think security is something where governments have to come in and play a role too. Without the right legislation, people will just circumvent the standards and there needs to be laws in place to protect consumers, else it's going to be dystopian. We don't want it to be dystopian. Yeah, it would really suck if it ends up being dystopian or after all this hard work.

If you have to give a bet with a chance of you Utopian versus dystopian metaverse in the next five to ten years, knowing how good humanity is at building these things or screwing up these kind of things.

Interesting question. Because you know, today's social media environment isn't very encouraging.

No.

But I think I am a humanist. I think in the end I think humans will come through. And I think the current semi dystopia that we're living through with social media today, it's just a learning experience and it's hopefully seeing the beginnings of it being rejected because people are beginning to understand that's how sucky it is. And this isn't doing anyone any good from a societal point of view. So I think the 2D social media that we have today, it will be self correcting that people want to engage if it's not good for their health, not good for their social network, you know. So I think we will get to a much better place and we may go through the same learning loop once we go 3D social. But I have to believe in the longer term, humanity will win out over technology and we will end up in a good place overall.

Yeah, well, you have to stay positive, I guess, because otherwise life is not much fun.

Exactly.

Yeah.

But it comes back to the Darwinian thing in the end, right? In the end, you might take weird detours where stuff gets weird, but in the end, who wants to be in a dystopian environment? No one.

Right.

No one wants to be apart from three people at the top, but we outnumber them. So, you know.

Yeah, let's hope so that it will end up in a positive way. I certainly tend to write the book in such a way that it will help people do the right thing. So your input and your thoughts that you shared are very useful. So thank you so much for that.

Of course. No, thank you for the opportunity to contribute.

Bye Bye.

And that wraps up the conversation with Neil Trevatt. If there's one thing that stands out for me from the conversation, it is that standards are absolutely crucial for the metaverse, and that the time it takes to develop them is not a bug, but it is a feature. Without standards, an open and inclusive metaverse is difficult to achieve, which is why in my new book, Step into the Metaverse, I discuss the need for standards and how they will make a difference when developing the metaverse. If you enjoyed this conversation, don't forget to hit the like and subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform, so you will be notified when any of the other interviews will become available. Thank you and see you in the metaverse.