As part of the Metaverse Standards Forum’s Special SDO Sessions, the Forum conducted the Towards Interoperable Anchoring for XR webinar on April 30, 2025. The webinar focused on efforts to achieve interoperable anchoring systems for extended reality (XR). The main presenters, Jérémy Lacoche (Orange) and Jérôme Royan (BCOM), shared work from ETSI’s Augmented Reality Framework (ARF), highlighting new standards, architecture, and open-source tools designed to enable consistent AR experiences across platforms and devices.
Neil Trevett, President of the Metaverse Standards Forum, opened with an overview of the Forum’s mission: to foster cross-silo cooperation and support pragmatic, bottom-up standardization efforts across metaverse technologies, including AI, XR, Web3, and digital twins.
The core issue addressed was the lack of a shared, standardized way to represent the real world in XR. Today’s AR systems often rely on ecosystem-specific spatial anchors and tracking technologies, limiting cross-platform compatibility. ETSI’s ARF proposes a unified model for representing the real world using a graph-based structure called a “world graph.” This integrates multiple types of trackables (e.g., image markers, 3D maps, geolocation data) into a spatially-organized, interoperable reference system. By separating the real-world model (world graph) from virtual content (scene graph), applications can share environments and assets more flexibly.
Open-source tools were also presented, including Unity-based editors, world analysis modules (for pose estimation), and remote server implementations. Demos illustrated industrial maintenance use cases using a combination of indoor and outdoor localization technologies across both iOS and Android.
The webinar concluded with Q&A, highlighting the need for consistent coordinate systems, interest in semantic integration (ontologies), and discussions on collaboration with standards groups like Khronos and OpenXR. ETSI’s ongoing work aims to expand support for geometry, appearance, and semantics, enabling richer real-world interactions and easier AR content creation at scale.
