În loc să construiască metaversul și să spere că utilizatorii vor veni, Microsoft dezvoltă mijloacele de a accesa metaversul și ni-l aduce nouă.
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➨ Microsoft has revealed a new feature for Teams built on Mesh that will enable avatars to collaborate, train and socialise across platforms in shared virtual spaces
➨ Accenture, which recently acquired 60,000 Oculus Quest VR headsets for onboarding new employees, is among the early adopters.
➨ The new feature launches next year
Povestea
Microsoft has revealed a new feature for Teams built on Mesh that will enable avatars to collaborate, train and socialise across platforms in shared virtual spaces, with Accenture, which recently acquired 60,000 Oculus Quest virtual reality headsets for onboarding new employees, among the early adopters.
Lansare în 2022, Mesh pentru Microsoft Teams combines the mixed reality capabilities of the Mesh software platform, which allows people in different physical locations to join collaborative and shared holographic experiences, with the productivity tools of Teams, where users can join virtual meetings, send chats and collaborate on shared documents.
Mesh for Teams is accessible via smartphones, laptops and various immersive technology-powered headsets, and enables users to don custom virtual avatars via the standard version of the video conferencing software. The feature was announced at Microsoft Ignite. Watch a video from the event below.
The feature then enables its users to take their avatars into virtual spaces to mix and mingle, collaborate, using existing tools designed to boost productivity and immersion within a tried-and-tested video conferencing solution.
Jeff Teper, a Microsoft corporate vice president whose responsibilities include the Microsoft 365 productivity tools Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive, explains that tools such as the Presenter and Together modes in Teams 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.”
What was lacking was a sense of a presence, in terms of both space and embodiment. Microsoft Technical Fellow Alex Kipman says: “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.”
The more than a decade of work on Mesh, first announced earlier this year, included several years building compatible immersive spaces with Accenture, the multinational IT services and consulting firm with a practice dedicated to extended reality (XR) technology.