OGC Launches Geo for Metaverse Domain Working Group

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has established the Geo for Metaverse Domain Working Group (DWG), a new collaborative initiative designed to bring geospatial expertise into the development of an open, interoperable metaverse. The working group is open to both OGC members and the broader technology community, providing a shared forum where experts can contribute knowledge, identify standards requirements, and coordinate innovation across emerging virtual environments.

The metaverse is increasingly viewed as a distributed network of digital environments that collectively form a large-scale digital twin of the physical world, augmented by entirely virtual spaces. Because this evolving ecosystem is expected to combine numerous independent platforms, technologies, and data sources, ensuring interoperability and open data exchange has become a major priority for standards organizations and technology developers alike. The new DWG is intended to help guide these efforts by focusing on geospatial components essential to navigation, modeling, simulation, mapping, and spatial data integration.

Geospatial information already plays a foundational role in many technologies that will shape metaverse applications, including 3D modeling, artificial intelligence, real-time data streaming, augmented and virtual reality systems, routing, and large-scale digital twin frameworks. Through the new working group, the OGC community will work to identify best practices and potential standards initiatives that enable these technologies to operate together effectively while supporting FAIR data principles—ensuring that information remains findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.

Recognizing that the metaverse will continue to evolve over time, the DWG will address both immediate technical needs and long-term interoperability goals. Collaboration across industries and standards organizations will be central to the initiative, and the working group will serve as OGC’s primary coordination point with the Metaverse Standards Forum, where OGC participates as a founding principal member.

The growing availability of geospatially anchored 3D datasets is already transforming industries such as construction, infrastructure management, and environmental modeling, and these same datasets are expected to form the backbone of many future virtual and hybrid digital environments. Ensuring that physical-world data and digital representations function seamlessly together at global scale is therefore considered essential for the long-term success of metaverse platforms.

The inaugural meeting of the Geo for Metaverse Domain Working Group was scheduled to take place during OGC’s 125th Member Meeting, held both virtually and in person in Frascati, Italy. Participants from across government, academia, industry, and research communities are invited to contribute to the group’s discussions and activities.

The Open Geospatial Consortium is an international community of experts dedicated to advancing open standards and collaborative innovation for location-based technologies. Through consensus-driven standards development, pilot initiatives, and cross-sector engagement, the organization works to ensure that geospatial information systems remain interoperable, widely accessible, and capable of supporting emerging technological ecosystems, including the expanding metaverse landscape.