Teams is on track to feature mixed reality meetings as Microsoft builds out its new Mesh platform.
Mesh, which has been unveiled at Ignite, is a collaboration platform that allows users to share virtual experiences.
A demonstration of Mesh during the opening keynote showed users manipulating 3D objects as avatars or holographic versions of themselves – and also included an interview with film director James Cameron via hologram (pictured, above).
You can view a replay of Satya Nadella’s introduction of Mesh, and the demonstrate, in the video below (the clip jumps to the launch of Mesh).
“This has been the dream for mixed reality; the idea from the very beginning,” said Microsoft Technical Fellow, Alex Kipman, when announcing Mesh.
“You can actually feel like you’re in the same place with someone sharing content or you can teleport from different mixed reality devices and be present with people even when you’re not physically together”
Crucially, Microsoft has quietly announced that Mesh’s ground-breaking capabilities are set to come to Teams.
A blog post by Nishant Thacker, Senior Technical Product Manager at Microsoft, contains a diagram displaying Mesh-enabled apps.
The Mesh demonstration from the keynote was made using Microsoft’s Altspace platform and there is already an app designed for Microsoft’s HoloLens headset.
But Microsoft also revealed that Teams integration is “coming later”.
An integration with Teams would seem like a logical next step for Mesh, and vice versa, given both platforms’ emphasis on collaboration.
The mesh announcement came not long after Cisco boss Chuck Robbins revealed that he envisages a 3D future for Webex.
Microsoft said that it expects Mesh to be incorporated into a range of applications from its partners, not just its own suite of apps – with Dynamics 365 integration also on the roadmap.
Overcoming Challenges
Thacker said that the development of immersive mixed reality experiences has been hindered by four key problems:
- Representing people in MR with appropriate realism requires a lot of time and resources.
- Keeping a hologram stable in a shared MR space across time and device types is a non-trivial problem.
- It is hard to bring high-fidelity 3D models into MR to support the file formats our customers have.
- Synchronizing actions and expressions of people in a geographically distributed MR session is complex.
He said that Microsoft is solving these problems for developers by giving them Mesh as a platform to develop on top of, rather than them having to build from scratch. The Mesh SDK allows developers to target their choice of platform – including AR, VR, PCs or phones.
Mesh is accessible and not just available on Microsoft hardware. Headsets such as HP Reverb G2 and Oculus Quest 2 are supported.
View our Ignite content hub here.
