IEEE P2048-4 is the part of the IEEE 2048 virtual and augmented reality standards series that specifies requirements and methods for verifying a person’s identity in immersive (virtual and augmented reality) environments — Person Identity. It lets a user identify themselves to a site or service through one or more identity authorities, authenticate individual pieces of information without disclosing additional data, and present a certified visual appearance (avatar). Its sibling IEEE P2048-3 addresses the complementary media question of how immersive video files and streams are containerised, signalled and delivered, so that verified identity can govern entitlement to the immersive content those formats carry.
Semantic Classification
Content
Definition
IEEE P2048-4 is the Person Identity part of the IEEE P2048 series on virtual and augmented reality. (Earlier drafts of this page mis-assigned the part numbers: authoritative IEEE and MPEG liaison documents record P2048.4 as “Person Identity” and P2048.3 as “Immersive Video File and Stream Formats” — the reverse of the assignment previously stated here.) Its scope is the verification of who a user is inside an immersive environment: how a person identifies themselves to a site or service, potentially through several competing identity authorities; how they authenticate a singular piece of information (for example, that they are over 18) without having to disclose additional personal data to the relying site; and how they present themselves with specific visual assets whose appearance can be certified.
The part therefore sits at the intersection of identity, privacy and embodiment in VR/AR. It is concerned with selective disclosure and trust in identity authorities rather than with media coding, aligning it with the broader digital-identity and verifiable-credentials landscape while being specialised to the avatar-mediated, spatial context of immersive systems, where a user’s appearance is itself a claim that may need to be attested.
Its sibling IEEE P2048-3 standardises the complementary media layer — how immersive video files and streams are containerised, signalled and delivered — and IEEE P2048.2 defines the immersive-video taxonomy and quality metrics. Identity and media meet in deployed systems, where a verified person identity governs entitlement to protected immersive content, but their normative scopes are disjoint.
Current Landscape
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The IEEE VR/AR Working Group (VRARWG) lists P2048.4 as “Standard for Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality: Person Identity”, one of twelve parts in development as of 2025; the working group’s own page and MPEG’s SDO-liaison catalogue both record this scope, correcting the file-format description previously given here.
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The stated aim is to let a VR user identify themselves through a number of identity authorities, authenticate individual claims without over-disclosing to a relying site, and present a certified visual appearance — closely paralleling selective-disclosure goals in W3C Verifiable Credentials and mobile-credential work such as ISO/IEC 18013-5.
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MPEG liaison analysis notes that identity is largely outside MPEG-I’s remit, with only partial overlap in MPEG-V/MPEG-7/21 tooling, leaving IEEE P2048.4 as the principal VR/AR-community effort on immersive person identity.
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The part remains at emerging maturity, its open fronts being proof-of-personhood, avatar attestation and privacy-preserving authentication in shared immersive spaces.
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