Microsoft brings 3D meetings to Teams

Microsoft launched immersive three-dimensional meetings within the Teams platform, and the company's mixed reality platform Mesh came out of the preview phase and the company integrated it into Teams to allow people to gather in virtual spaces with or without virtual reality headsets. The software giant officially brought the metaverse to the workplace with the full launch of virtual meeting spaces.

Microsoft said meetings at Mesh give employees a sense of shared presence, even when geographically distant, with features like spatial audio that add a sense of immersion. The experience of the mixed reality platform Mesh within Teams is very similar to the institutional version of AltspaceVR, the social virtual reality platform that Microsoft acquired in 2017 and closed a year ago.
Teams' Mesh 3D meetings work best with VR headglasses, with Microsoft currently supporting Meta's Quest glasses.

You can participate in three-dimensional virtual meetings, and spatial audio emulates the ability to have private conversations in the office by staying away from other coworkers in the virtual space. Three-dimensional environments are also customizable via games or quests to break the deadlock for distant colleagues you may not have met before.

Microsoft provides all the standard features of the Mesh mixed reality platform, including immersive spaces in Teams, to business subscribers of the Teams platform. If you want to deploy a dedicated immersive space, you must have a Teams Premium license.

Mesh is the virtual future of Teams meetings. Mesh still exists as a platform that allows developers to leverage VR and AR experiences, although integrating it into Teams is the natural step.

Questions remain regarding companies' adoption of these types of virtual meetings, and Microsoft says that Accenture, BP, Takeda and Mercy Ships currently use Mesh, although these companies are a small fraction of the companies that use Teams daily. The integration helps increase the adoption of these types of virtual meetings by companies, although Mesh is on its way to becoming a feature of Teams rather than an independent platform.

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