WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Until now travelling between different Metaverse platforms and taking your digital stuff and assets with you has been hard, now it’s less hard …

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The other day the Open Metaverse Alliance for Web3 announced a project to build standards to enable people “to travel seamlessly through the metaverse.” OMA3, an association based in Zug, Switzerland, announced the Inter-World Portalling System (IWPS) project and published the IWPS position paper to get the project off the ground.

OMA3 is a consortium of the top metaverse companies in Web3. Its mission is to build standards and infrastructure to enable the user-owned and user-controlled metaverse. Which would be a nice Utopia but probably won’t happen – certainly not as they envisage as companies such as Meta and Microsoft continue to carve out walled gardens.

Apparently IWPS will enable users to walk through inter-world portals to travel seamlessly among metaverse platforms such as Alien Worlds, My Neighbor Alice, Sandbox, Space, Superworld, and Upland.

The industrial revolution was fuelled, in part, by advancements in transportation technology. Railroads, highways, and airports served as critical conduits, knitting together disparate commercial hubs and facilitating the free flow of goods, services, and people. These networks of physical connectivity exponentially increased productivity and accelerated the pace of economic growth, OMA3 said.

Likewise, the introduction of the HTTP standard in the digital realm was a watershed moment in the evolution of the internet. It broke down information silos, connected isolated data repositories, and enabled the seamless transfer of knowledge across the globe. In essence, HTTP acted as a universal translator, allowing diverse systems to communicate and interact, and led to an unprecedented explosion in the availability and accessibility of information.

And OMA3 said IWPS has the potential to be the next pivotal development in this lineage of transformative technologies. Just as railroads and highways connected physical spaces, and HTTP linked digital repositories, IWPS promises to bridge disparate metaverse environments.

It provides a means of “transportation” within the digital realm, enabling users to move seamlessly between different metaverse platforms, thereby enhancing accessibility and engagement. The development and standardization of IWPS stands as the next frontier in the evolution of the metaverse, with the potential to unlock new levels of connectivity, commerce, and shared experiences within the digital realm.

OMA3 has released a position paper that details the importance of IWPS as well as the use cases and development framework. This paper can be found on OMA3’s Github repository.

This undertaking is best achieved with the involvement of the whole Web3 metaverse community so OMA3 say they welcome comments in Github and organisations that desire to participate in the development of the standard should join OMA3.