Parties interested in turning Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's favorite buzzword into a reality announced on Wednesday that they have formed The Metaverse Standards Forum.

The forum, according to today's announcement, is meant to "foster the development of open standards for the metaverse.".

"The Forum will explore where the lack of interoperability is holding back metaverse deployment and how the work of Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) defining and evolving needed standards may be coordinated and accelerated," the group said in its announcement.

Beyond its unannounced (but much-discussed) AR headset said to be in development, CEO Tim Cook said Apple's role in the metaverse market is "a big question" in Apple's Q1 2022 earnings call in January.

Right now, we have over 14,000 AR kit apps in the App Store, which provide incredible AR experiences for millions of people today," Cook said when asked about Apple's metaverse plans, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript.

The initiative was led by The Kronos Group, a nonprofit focused on emerging technologies that is also hosting The Metaverse Standards Forum.

The new group provides free, open membership, so both companies could join the metaverse forum down the line.

The Metaverse Standards Forum also highlighted potential areas of collaborative spatial computing, including AR and VR, of course, but also "photorealistic content authoring, geospatial systems, end-user content tooling, digital twins, real-time collaboration, physical simulation, online economies," and more.