Dubbed GL Transmission Format (glTF) it could put magnitudes more 3D content on the internet and it is designed to streamline the way 3D content is transmitted and loaded across any device. The big idea is that it will fill the role that JPEG did when it helped people make and use images.

Khronos is backed by Valve, Oculus Microsoft, Adobe and Amazon. Microsoft, Adobe, Box and OTOY directly voiced support for the glTF standard in an announcement today, indicating some industry momentum for the format. Oculus Chief Technology Officer John Carmack said:

“The world has long needed an efficient, usable standard for 3D scenes that sits at the level of common image, audio, video, and text formats. Not an authoring format, or necessarily a format you would use for a hyper optimized platform specific application, but something at home on the internet, capable of being directly created and consumed by many different applications.”

What they want is to create a “metaverse” which will be an extension of the Internet into 3D space and enable countless spaces can be linked up and explored with mixed reality.

This would  be nearly impossible if firms hang onto proprietary standards.

The royalty-free glTF specification minimises the size of 3D scenes and models while providing the tech industry with a “common publishing format for 3D content tools and services, analogous to the JPEG format for images.

The announcement from the Khronos Group is part of a wave of information being released by researchers, companies and industry groups ahead of the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference.