Following its launch at CES in January this year, the Virtual Reality Industry Forum (VRIF) held an open meeting at NAB 2017 to share its work on attempts to speed up the adoption of VR.

VRIF, which is composed of companies and organisations from a broad range of sectors in the industry, advocates consensus around industry standards for the creation of an interoperable, end-to-end ecosystem for high-quality audiovisual VR services.

It wants to hasten adoption of VR by ensuring a good consumer experience.

Action plan

At NAB, the VRIF spoke of work that it has undertaken and the activities of its various working Groups.

“At CES, we discussed our plans. At NAB we will be discussing how we have been putting these plans into action,” said Rob Koenen, VRIF President.

Industry Guidelines will cover all aspects of VR content creation and delivery

“VRIF has an end-to-end perspective – from the production through to playback on consumer devices,” said Koenen.

”Our multifaceted Industry Guidelines will cover the VR production, delivery and consumption chain, helping ensure best practices are used and interoperability is maintained.”

Industry guidelines

The industry guidelines aim to avoid fragmentation of VR caused by closed systems and proprietary solutions, and the Forum expects to publish the first guidelines later this year.

Building on open international standards, they will address elements of the end-to-end VR chain including production, distribution, playback and security.

VRIF also seeks to make content and tools available to help the industry test and deploy interoperable services.