The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) organized  a workshop on " Metaverse and multimedia" which took place on 18  October  2022 at ITU headquarters, (Room H) in Geneva, Switzerland. The workshop was organised as a physical event with remote participation. The workshop took place within the context of the ITU-T Study Group 16 discussions on metaverse in Geneva, 17 to 28 October 2022. 

Background 
The metaverse concept, though still in its infancy, has attracted considerable public attention. Bloomberg analysts have suggested the total market volume of metaverse related business as the world’s “next big technology platform” could reach USD 800 billion by 2024, doubling its value in 2020.

Multimedia related technologies are expected to serve as a key enabler of the Metaverse in how the technology can potentially augment the experience of users in areas such as extended reality (AR, VR and XR) at scale, spatial multimedia, multi-modal user interface, realistic avatar creation, persistence spaces, multilingual accessibility, intuitive interfacing, etc.

ITU-T SG 16 in its role as ITU-T’s lead Study Group on Multimedia has been studying technologies and working on standards that are pioneering in many directions and considered as essential building blocks for metaverse-based services and applications. The fact that SG16 is a lead SG on many technical subjects that have close relationship with metaverse (such as multimedia), led to the creation of a Correspondence Group at SG16 [SG16 CG-Metaverse]. The Correspondence Group on Metaverse has organized three e-meetings, and conducted use cases collection, technical analysis, preliminary standardization analysis, future work methods suggestion for the metaverse.

Over the course of these ITU activities and others, the importance for ITU-T SG16 to work on the topic of Multimedia and Metaverse, and open unified standards, has been identified. 

The SDOs that are closely involved in the technical study and standardization of multimedia and metaverse as an integrated subject rather than as two separate disciplines are encouraged to have some forms of platform for the following purposes:

• Information sharing, views exchange to facilitate mutual understanding building
  
• Coordination and synchronization 
  
• Awareness promotion targeting industry, academia, regulators, etc., aiming at inputs collection to cover unknown use cases and scenarios, etc.
  
• Exploration of the way forward and opening up of new frontiers
  
• Addressing issues of common interests and concerns including but not limited to privacy, trust, security, regulatory matters 
  

Also, we need to come to the realization that some SDOs with well-established capabilities and rich experiences in developing metaverse related standards are now facing the task of determining the future directions after achieving their latest significant milestones. 

Coordination and synchronization amongst different SDOs mean not only a well-developed mutual understanding serving the purpose of avoiding duplication and overlapping, but also a model in which each SDO’s strength can be best exploited through a reasonable division of work. 

Therefore, ITU-T SG16 organized a workshop about Multimedia and Metaverse in the hope that some progress could be accomplished to boost the subsequent work in the common areas between Multimedia and Metaverse.


Target Audience