Previous work has led to the publication of a standard guide for the calibration of optical instruments for making full-field measurements of in-plane strain in pseudo-static cases. A consortium of international organizations drawn from across the innovation process is engaged in extending this earlier work to allow the calibration of instruments capable of making fullfield measurements of in-plane and out-of-plane deformations resulting from time-varying loading that may or may not be repetitive or cyclic. Preliminary designs for a reference material have been completed and are being tested in a round robin exercise. Calibration of the system employed for performing measurements in experiments allows the associated uncertainty to be defined which is an important step in the validation of computational models. However no recognized procedures exist for performing validations of simulations with full-field data from experiments. The consortium is developing appropriate validation procedures based on using image decomposition to enable comprehensive and quantitative comparisons between data sets for strain from experiments and simulations. Progress will be reported and the direction of planned work will be discussed to allow input from the user-community.