Microsoft announces VR and AR Groups with 3D avatars to create metaverse

Microsoft is building its own metaverse and wants it to be available to users before the Facebook outbreak.

POINTS

1. Microsoft introduces visual spaces and 3D avatars to Groups.

2. Mesh will be a collaborative platform that will bring people to the VR venue of the conference.

3. New VR features for Microsoft Teams will be available from the first half of 2022.

The skills of VR, AR, and MR to bring the world online. An important part of the metaverse are visual avatars that users can use anywhere, including conferences and meetings. Well, that would take time. Not for Microsoft, though. Declared Mesh, equivalent to metaverse and brings real-time interactive tools to Team users.

Mesh will use Microsoft's authentic hybrid technology with HoloLens headsets for visual effects, conferences, and video calls Team users will be able to join them in avatars, meanwhile, which look a little more fun than the metaverse Meta version. The best integration of this technology will be with all Microsoft 365 applications and services - most notably Meta Horizon Workrooms. So, the situation can be when you want to participate in a document almost, you can just put on your headphones and do that on your VR avatars.

While VR avatars are considered the next big thing in collaboration between partners and friends, the Microsoft Mesh platform will also allow users to access regular or web-based Group Meetings such as their VR versions and themselves. There will be a 3D image you can customize for Group Video calls, and it will be available even outside the headset. Depending on the session, your avatar will show you both 3D and 2D.3

3D avatars, however, will work best together. Microsoft will use artificial intelligence to listen to your voice and present your avatar in a way that shows you are speaking the right words. You will also be able to raise your hands with your avatar when you press the hand lift button during a video call.

The foundation for this technology began during the epidemic when Groups and platforms alike began to intensify as people were confined inside their homes. But with the increasing use of forums and meetings, “meeting fatigue” has become a thing of the past. After launching Integrated Group Mode, Mesh was Microsoft's attempt to slow it down and allow people to be more comfortable in the visual assembly.

With Mesh, Microsoft wants to create a metaverse that seeks to be better and more complete than what Meta, a parent company of Facebook, is building. That could mean more access and more freedom for users, which is why Microsoft avatars will not be binary, so anyone can choose to look but want to represent who they are. Also, the company works with translation and writing tools for Mesh-powered meetings where anyone can be a part of the development in their own language.

Microsoft has announced that new visual effects and avatars will be released in the first half of 2022. Hopefully, Meta will be able to come up with a similar strategy with the timeline of the release at that time.