Microsoft Joins The Metaverse Race, Launches Mesh With 3D Avatars, Immersive Spaces

Microsoft is now ready to launch its own version of metaverse where its users can collaborate and interact in 3D digital avatars. It is starting with Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Joins The Metaverse Race, Launches Mesh With 3D Avatars

As the battle in the metaverse space heats up, after Facebook, now Microsoft is also ready to launch its own version where its users can collaborate and interact in 3D digital avatars. At the annual Ignite 2021 conference, the tech giant announced Mesh for its video conferencing platform Teams that will allow users to interact in collaborative and shared holographic experiences.

"Microsoft today has unveiled a solution to this problem that begins rolling out in 2022: Mesh for Microsoft Teams. The feature combines the mixed-reality capabilities of Microsoft Mesh, which allows people in different physical locations to join collaborative and shared holographic experiences, with the productivity tools of Microsoft Teams, where people can join virtual meetings, send chats, collaborate on shared documents and more," Jeff Teper, a Microsoft corporate vice president, said in a statement late on Tuesday.

"The first step most users of Mesh for Teams will take is to join a standard Teams meeting as a customised avatar of themselves instead of as a static picture or on video. Organizations can also build immersive spaces – metaverses – within Teams. Mesh for Teams users can take their avatars into these spaces to mix and mingle, collaborate on projects and experience those serendipitous encounters that spark innovation," Teper added.

What Satya Nadella has to say about metaverse

Mesh for Teams -- which everybody will be able to access from standard smartphones and laptops to mixed-reality headsets -- is designed to make online meetings more personal and engaging. It’s also a gateway to the metaverse -- a persistent digital world that is inhabited by digital twins of people, places and things.

According to Microsoft CEO and Chairman Satya Nadella, the company is bringing people, places and things together with the digital world. “As the digital and physical worlds come together, we are creating an entirely new platform layer, which is the metaverse. In a sense the metaverse enables us to embed computing into the real world and embed the real world into computing, bringing real presence to any digital space,” Nadella said.

Mesh for Microsoft Teams, a collaborative platform for virtual experiences, will begin to roll out in 2022. Mesh for Teams will not be restricted to meetings only and will include face-to-face meetings, chats, emails and video calls.

“As a company whose focus is on productivity, on knowledge workers, it’s something that customers are really asking us for, and it’s coupled with the vision of mixed reality that we’ve been working on for 12 years. It’s all coming together," said Alex Kipman, Microsoft Technical Fellow.