What Is The Metaverse? How Microsoft Could Win

 What Is The Metaverse? How Microsoft Could Win.

What Is A Metaverse?

Simply put, a Metaverse is a digital space represented by digital representations of people, places, and things. In other words, it’s a “digital world” with real people represented by digital objects.

In many ways, Microsoft Teams or Zoom is already a form of a Metaverse. You are “there” in the room, but you may be a static image, an avatar, or a live video. So Metaverse is a broader context for “bringing people together.”

It can be used for many things: meetings, visiting a factory floor, onboarding, or training. In fact, almost every HR and talent-related program can be redesigned for the Metaverse. And if you wear 3D glasses, the Metaverse is fully immersive.

Why Microsoft Could Win Big

As with all new technologies, there will be a lot of “get rich quick” ideas to come. And while Facebook may talk about it a lot, they can’t “own” the Metaverse. It would be like saying Facebook “owns the internet.” The Metaverse is a new set of technologies that many providers will build, and now it’s a race to see who adds value the fastest.

Personally, I’m a fan of Microsoft’s strategy right now. The company is focused on building Mesh, which is a platform that will power Teams and other applications, along with Hololens, an augmented reality solution that is widely used in manufacturing, education, and the military. Microsoft wants to enable Metaverse apps for business, education, training, and entertainment. These are all real-world needs, each of which can be enhanced and reinvented with Avatars, VR, and AR.

Microsoft’s Own Metaverse Is Coming, and It Will Have PowerPoint

The software maker is embracing the buzzy concept with new products due next year

If you’re worried the metaverse will be all fun and games, fear not: Microsoft Corp. is taking its own stab at the idea, and it will have PowerPoint and Excel.

The company is adapting its signature software products to create a more corporate version of the metaverse — a concept promoted by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg that promises to let users live, work and play within interconnected virtual worlds.

The first offering, a version of Microsoft’s Teams chat and conferencing program that features digital avatars, is in testing now and will be available in the first half of 2022. Customers will be able to share Office files and features, like PowerPoint decks, in the virtual world.

“This pandemic has made the commercial use cases much more mainstream, even though sometimes the consumer stuff feels like science fiction,” Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. Nadella himself has used the technology to visit a Covid-19 ward in a U.K. hospital, a Toyota manufacturing plant and even the international space station, he said.

The new Teams feature, unveiled Tuesday at the company’s Ignite conference, will let businesses create immersive spaces where workers can meet. The technology uses Microsoft software 5 earlier this year called Mesh that enables augmented reality and virtual reality experiences across a variety of goggles, including Microsoft’s own HoloLens. Customers who lack a device capable of displaying 3D images can experience the content and avatars in 2D.

The public perception of the metaverse — as a futuristic world where plugged-in people recreate their whole lives online — is still a ways off. But the business uses are starting to be available now, Nadella said.

Accenture used Microsoft software to create a “digital twin” of its headquarters in order to run orientations for new employees during the pandemic. The consulting firm has run more than 100 such events, reaching more than 10,000 employees, said Microsoft Vice President Jared Spataro.

Anheuser-Busch InBev created copies of its brewing operations and supply chain that are synchronized with the actual facilities and based on up-to-date information. The system lets brewers adjust to changing conditions and helps operators keep the packaging machines up and and running. Microsoft wants to sell more cloud software that lets customers ranging from retailers to manufacturers do this.

“You could, for instance, experience a Best Buy store in the metaverse” and check out displays and devices, Spataro said. “Today when you think of a website, it is not very well connected to the physicality of what we experience.”

To that end, Microsoft also unveiled a product called Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces on Tuesday. It will let people move and interact within retail and factory spaces.

While Microsoft is leading with corporate applications for the metaverse, expect its Xbox gaming platform to take part in the future, Nadella said.

“You can absolutely expect us to do things in gaming,” he said “If you take Halo as a game, it is a metaverse. Minecraft is a metaverse, and so is Flight Sim. In some sense, they are 2D today, but the question is, can you now take that to a full 3D world, and so we absolutely plan to do so.”

Microsoft’s metaverse apps will work with the Oculus googles made by Meta Platforms Inc., formerly Facebook. But it’s not yet clear how various companies’ visions of the metaverse will be able to connect. If, say, Nadella and Zuckerberg wanted to meet up in the metaverse, would they have to choose either Microsoft’s Teams or Meta’s Horizon Workroom?

A Teams conference call can mix live video and avatar participants

Microsoft is focused on practical applications of the metaverse — ones where the benefits are clear, Nadella said. And that will help get people get accustomed to an idea that some critics call creepy.

“There is nothing creepy about visiting a Covid ward remotely for a doctor to be able to help their patients, or to be able to do remote assistance in a manufacturing line in a time of Covid crisis when that manufacturing line needs to be fixed by an engineer working from home,” he said.

At the Ignite conference, Microsoft also announced:

• Azure OpenAI, a cloud-based service that lets customers — by invitation only for now — use the system’s powerful artificial intelligence models
• New Teams features for working and chatting with users and groups outside a particular corporate network
• Loop, a new application that operates across different programs to collect files, links and data from other apps into a single workspace.

Microsoft’s Mesh Metaverse Launches Early 2022

Teams tech aims to make collaboration personal and fun

Microsoft has announced that it will begin rolling out its metaverse early next year, in the form of Mesh for Microsoft Teams. The news comes just days after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote address at Facebook Connects 2021 – see our full report.

Obviously keen not to be left out of the conversation, Microsoft shared the news that in the first half of 2022, users will be able to access Mesh on HoloLens 2, VR headsets, mobile phones, tablets or PCs, aiming, ‘To make collaboration in the ‘metaverse’ personal and fun’.

The service will utilise mixed-reality capabilities – remember this is the company behind Hololens – to allow 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.

Effective and engaged

In a blog post by CTO John Roach, he revealed that during the global pandemic, “Microsoft productivity experts have observed two trends: remote workers are far more efficient than most business leaders ever imagined, and they miss each other”.

Furthermore, ongoing studies in Microsoft’s research organisation find that, “People feel more present and engaged in meetings when everyone turns on their video cameras,” but it’s not always convenient to do so. The answer proposed by Mesh is virtual avatars with facial expressions, as well as gestures.

Those tools have accomplished both goals of helping a team be more effective and also helping individuals be more engaged.

Jeff Teper, corporate VP of Microsoft 365 said that, “These tools are all ways to signal we’re in the same virtual space, we’re one team, we’re one group, and help take the formality down a peg and the engagement up a peg. We’ve seen that those tools have accomplished both goals of helping a team be more effective and also helping individuals be more engaged.”

Microsoft Technical Fellow Alex Kipman said, “As a company whose focus is on productivity, 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.”

Mesh for Teams will roll out with a set of pre-built immersive spaces to support a variety of contexts, from meetings to social mixers. Over time, organisations will be able to build custom immersive spaces.

From audio to avatars

Principal project manager Katie Kelly explained a little about how the technology might develop saying, “To start, we will take audio cues so as you talk your face will animate. You’ll also have animations that bring additional expressivity to the avatars. Your hands will move. There will be a feeling of presence even though it’s as simple as being able to take your audio and manifest that as facial expressions”.

That sounds some way behind the full hand tracking to be found in Meta/Oculus’ Horizon Workrooms, but Kelly explained, “That’s the first release. The ambition is to closely follow that with Microsoft’s plethora of AI technologies so that we can use the camera to insinuate where your mouth is and mimic your head and facial movements. The experience will continue to evolve over time as sensor technology improves across devices”.

Not only is Mesh an enterprise tool – “It’s also a gateway to the metaverse”

Gateway to the metaverse

Roach observed in his post that not only is Mesh an enterprise tool – “It’s also a gateway to the metaverse”. He explained further saying, “Think of the metaverse as a new version – or a new vision – of the internet, one where people gather to communicate, collaborate and share with personal virtual presence on any device”.

According to Roach, Kipman’s vision for mixed reality throughout the last 12 years has always been a medium that moves people from solitary experiences – single person, single device – into content placed over the real world to create an environment fine-tuned for collaboration.

Building on the company’s work within the enterprise sector, the ambition is that Mesh will, ‘Allow organisations to create metaverses, persistent virtual worlds for people to collaborate, places that connect the physical world to the virtual world via digital twins of people, places and things’.

Race for the Metaverse, Microsoft prepares for 2022 launch

As it turns out, Facebook wasn’t the only big tech working heavily on the metaverse; Microsoft is taking a bigger leap at the Metaverse project by creating a more corporate version that can help people meet up in a digital environment, make meetings more comfortable with the use of avatars and facilitate creative collaboration from all around the world.

Where Facebook(now Meta) wants the Metaverse to be the next evolution of social connection where people can socialize, learn, collaborate and play in ways that go beyond human imagination, Microsoft sees it as “a persistent, digital world that is connected to many aspects of the physical world, including people, places and things.”

The race to the Metaverse has the big techs exploring options to create a collection of shared online worlds in which physical, augmented, and virtual reality converge. In its Metaverse efforts, Facebook invested $50 million, rebranded to Meta, and created 10,000 new jobs across the European Union to help make the building of the Metaverse a reality.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has similar but bigger plans. The tech company announced: “The Microsoft Cloud provides a comprehensive set of resources designed to power metaverses – there will be more than one! – IoT capabilities that enable customers to create “digital twins” of physical objects in the cloud; utilizing Microsoft Mesh to build a shared sense of presence on devices; and using AI-powered resources to create natural interactions through speech and vision machine learning models.”

“As we discuss the metaverse, we are thinking about both a new medium and an app type, like the way we talked about the web and websites a long, long time ago, aka the 1990s. At Ignite, we are making two important announcements that continue the evolution of the metaverse: Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces; and Mesh for Microsoft Teams.”

Earlier in May, Microsoft disclosed it was uniquely positioned with a stack of artificial intelligence and mixed reality tools to help companies start developing metaverse apps. A number of gaming companies, including Fortnite’s owner Epic Games, have also released simulation software and VR services for a metaverse.

To support its Metaverse project, Microsoft will roll out Mesh for Microsoft Teams in 2022. 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.

Mesh will allow organizations to create metaverses, persistent virtual worlds for people to collaborate, places that connect the physical world to the virtual world via digital twins of people, places and things.