Background and Achievements
Renowned as the originator of many of the world’s best known business standards, BSI’s activity spans multiple sectors including aerospace, automotive, built environment and ICT.
Over 95% of BSI’s work is on international and European standards. In its role as the UK National Standards Body, BSI represents UK economic and social interests across the international standards organizations ISO, IEC, CEN, CENELEC and ETSI, providing the infrastructure for over 11,000 experts to work on international, European, national and PAS standards development in their chosen fields. BSI Publicly Available Specifications (PAS) is a standardization document that resembles a formal standard in structure and format, but it has a different development model. The objective of a PAS is to speed up standardization.
BSI is a leader in pushing the development of new fields of standards in emerging/evolving technology including artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, Blockchain, Big Data and Cyber Security. Internationally there are established standards around Virtual and Augmented Reality (AR/VR) in areas such as immersive media.
Challenges for AR
In early 2018 BSI published a report entitled, The Requirement for Standards in the VR and AR Sectors, which cited the pivotal role that standardization will play in moving virtual/augmented reality technology from the niche to the mainstream.
The report referenced how standardization could bolster health and safety in the sector, both to protect the user from injury and to safeguard the industry from litigation from users who may have been injured whilst using virtual reality but did not follow safety guidelines. The report suggested that a consumer and enterprise user framework could include guidelines for a safe set-up of the technology; recommends safe immersion periods; user age limits; and content warnings. Establishing ‘content capture’ best practice guidance is also a key near-term priority for the virtual reality industry in order to facilitate the industry in creating high-quality content. With the industry still experimenting with content production processes there is a golden opportunity to establish industry leading best practice. Such standards could cover the following areas: frame rate; resolution/pixel count; audio; compression; file format. Simplifying the terminology used by the sector is a further goal of standardization, with too many acronyms currently being used.
BSI is currently working to establish a route to develop these (and other) standards ideas to aid the growth of the VR and AR markets.
Why AR
BSI has identified AR and VR as emerging technologies that could benefit from standardization.