Microsoft Tests Metaverse Business, Will Compete With Facebook!

JAKARTA - Currently, technology companies are looking at the metaverse as their new business field. Just a few days after Facebook plunged into it, now Microsoft is joining in.

Microsoft will reportedly be bringing Mesh, a collaborative platform for virtual experiences, directly to Microsoft Teams next year. This is a major effort to combine corporate mixed reality and HoloLens (smart glasses) to work during meetings and video calls, which anyone can participate in thanks to animated avatars.

Unlike Mesh, Facebook is not just entering the world of the metaverse, even changing its name to "Meta". The company aims to build a virtual space for consumers and businesses. With the announcements of Microsoft and Meta, the two seem to be in tight competition in the metaverse.

Mesh will begin to roll out in the first half of 2022. Microsoft is building on efforts like Together Mode and other experiments to make meetings more interactive, after months of people working from home and adjusting to hybrid work.

When Mesh arrives, Microsoft Teams will get a new 3D avatar and users don't need to put on a VR headset to use it. These avatars can actually represent encounters in 2D and 3D, so users can choose to have an animated version of themselves if they don't want to activate the webcam.

"So I can choose how I want to appear, whether it's a video or an avatar, and there are a variety of custom options to choose how you want to appear in meetings", said the principal product manager for Microsoft Mesh, Katie Kelly as quoted by The Verge, Wednesday, November 3.

By leveraging AI, Microsoft will listen to the user's voice and then animate the avatar. If the user switches to a more immersive 3D meeting, this animation will also raise their hand when the user presses the raise hand option or follows the movement of the emoji around the avatar.

This virtual environment will obviously work best with a VR or AR headset, but the company will make it open to anyone on multiple devices thanks to the work of animated avatars.

“I think the thing that really differentiates how Microsoft approaches the metaverse and our own experience starts with the human experience, so the feeling of presence, talking to someone, making eye contact, and reacting will be important”, Kelly explains.

Interestingly, Microsoft is even adding translations and transcripts, so users might be able to meet in a virtual Teams room with colleagues from around the world.

This virtual space is not only useful to the Teams community, but companies have also used it to recruit new employees during the pandemic.

For information, Microsoft's plans to metaverse within Teams come just days after Facebook changed its name to Meta as the name of its parent company. Meta is working on a very similar concept to Microsoft, led by the idea of a digital avatar representing the user in a virtual space.

In this new business, Microsoft and Meta are not alone. Many companies have started using platforms like Fortnite, as well as Spatial which offers virtual spaces for events, meetings, and networking opportunities.