As humans are getting digital extensively, their lives seem to get more and more embedded with the digital world. From being a tool for communication to storing data to social media, the digital world is on the cusp of mimicking our whole life now. With the agenda of further strengthening its stand in the digital space Facebook recently, ‘Meta’morphosised itself into a ‘metaverse company’ and rebranded into ‘Meta’. Looks like Facebook is not the only one to enter into this race for capturing the Metaverse market, another technology giant, Microsoft is also making a foray.
Microsoft will launch Metaverse features in the upcoming months
The Redmond, Washington-based company is planning to roll out Mesh for Teams starting in early 2022. Mesh will build on existing Teams features like “Together mode” and “Presenter mode,” which make remote and hybrid meetings more collaborative and immersive.
The updated version of Teams will allow organizations to create “metaverses” where people can collaborate in virtual environments that mimic physical offices and other shared spaces. Everyone in a meeting can be “present without being physically present using personalized avatars.
At least during the initial days, Work is likely to be the main use case for the immersive internet. As of now more than 250 million people already use Teams. So it becomes a fertile ground for the company to test its new metaverse features.
Microsoft’s Metaverse will require no additional equipment
We all know, Facebook (now Meta) eyeing a metaverse powered by virtual reality headsets. But at the same time, Microsoft seems focused on making the virtual world accessible via any device. The company has decided not to discriminate between laptops with a single microphone and a HoloLens headset with six microphones and 16 cameras.
According to Katie Kelly, a principal project manager at Microsoft working on Mesh for Teams., in its first iteration, Mesh will ”take your audio and manifest that as facial expressions, later the camera will insinuate where your mouth is and mimic your head and facial movements.”
Most importantly, Microsoft’s target audience isn’t the teen and young adult generation Facebook has called its “north star.” The company is focused on enterprise users. “This pandemic has made the commercial use cases much more mainstream, even though sometimes the consumer stuff feels like science fiction,” CEO Satya Nadella said recently.