Microsoft Mesh for Teams

Microsoft last month said it plans to make Teams the “gateway” to metaverses with its introduction of Mesh for Teams. The new feature, set to appear during the first half of 2022, will introduce avatars and holograms to meetings, aiming to make remote attendees and people in the office more immersive. Introduced at the Microsoft Ignite conference, chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said the following about Mesh for Teams in his keynote address:

“When we talk about the metaverse, we’re describing both a new platform and a new application type, similar to how we talked about the web and websites in the early ’90s. In a sense, the metaverse enables us to embed computing into the real world, and to embed the real world into computing, bringing real presence to any digital space.”

Nadella described Mesh for Microsoft Teams as a breakthrough.

“I can’t overstate how much of a breakthrough this is,” he said. “For years, we’ve talked about creating this digital representation of the world. But now we actually have the opportunity to go into that world and participate in it.”