Microsoft is launching Mesh for Microsoft Teams – a service that combines the AR/VR capabilities of Microsoft Mesh — which allows people in different physical locations to join collaborative experiences through AR and VR — with the productivity tools of Teams.
This announcement was made at its November Ignite developer event. The company noted that the ability to work from anywhere and connect with colleagues online is awesome, but remote meetings can feel impersonal and lack the small moments that build relationships and careers.
That is why they are launching Mesh for Teams – which anyone will be able to access from standard smartphones and laptops to mixed-reality headsets. It is designed to make online meetings more personal, engaging, and fun it’s also a gateway to the metaverse – a persistent digital world that is inhabited by digital twins of people, places, and things.
How Mesh for Teams works
According to Microsoft corporate VP, Jeff Teper, Mesh builds on current Teams capabilities such as Together mode and Presenter view, which make remote and hybrid meetings more immersive.
Presenter mode utilizes AI to place everyone on a call in a shared room-like setting, such as a coffee shop, while Together mode uses AI to position everyone on a call in a shared room-like environment, such as a coffee shop.
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,” Teper said. “We’ve seen that those tools have accomplished both goals of helping a team be more effective and also helping individuals be more engaged.”
The majority of Mesh for Teams users will begin by attending a standard Teams meeting as a customized avatar of themselves rather than a static image or video. Within Teams, organizations may create immersive places – metaverses.
Microsoft Technical Fellow Alex Kipman said “Welcome to Mesh for Teams. 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.”
Users of Mesh for Teams can enter these locations with their avatars to collaborate, work on projects, and have those serendipitous meetings that stimulate creativity.