Microsoft CEO: The Metaverse will bring the real world into any digital space

Author: Baize Research Institute

Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella stated at yesterday's Microsoft Ignite conference that Microsoft will explore metaverse technology and join this digital world alongside a range of other major brands and companies.

Nadella shared, "As the digital world merges with the physical world, we are creating a whole new metaverse. In a sense, the metaverse allows us to embed computing into the real world and embed the real world into computing, bringing a sense of real presence to any digital space."

"Most importantly, we can bring our humanity with us and choose how we want to experience this world and who we want to interact with."

Frank Shaw, Microsoft's Vice President of Communications, wrote in a blog post on the company's official website yesterday that the company will launch over 90 new services and updates in three main areas, including powering the metaverse.

Frank believes that digital technology has been at the forefront of every industry for the past 18 months, and it is now more necessary than ever. The metaverse is a "persistent digital world that connects to many aspects of the physical world, including people, places, and things." Microsoft is powering the metaverse in a way similar to how it talked about the internet and websites in the 1990s.

"The metaverse will be a shared experience that supports interactions across the real and digital worlds. As businesses accelerate their digital transformation, the metaverse can help people gather in digital environments, use avatars to make meetings more comfortable, and facilitate creative collaboration from around the world."

The company plans to "continue to evolve the metaverse" through two new initiatives.

The first initiative, called "Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces," will enable people to interact in any space, from retail stores to factory floors, using AI-driven models and observational data.

In the context of the global pandemic forcing employees around the world to work and collaborate online, Microsoft's second initiative, called "Mesh for Microsoft Teams," will add a mixed-reality feature named Mesh on top of Microsoft's existing Teams functionality (online meetings), allowing people from different geographical locations to join collaborative work and share holographic experiences, where they can join virtual meetings, send chats, collaborate on shared documents, and more. It allows people to use personalized 3D avatars and experience an immersive space.

Anyone can access this "mixed reality" world through their phones and computers, aiming to make online meetings more personalized, engaging, and fun. This will also serve as Microsoft's gateway to the metaverse—a digital world of people, places, and things.

Jeff Teper, Vice President at Microsoft and head of the Mesh feature, views the metaverse as "a new version or vision of the internet," where people gather together to communicate, collaborate, and share through personal virtual avatars on any device.

It is reported that the beta version of the first initiative will be launched in early December, while the second product will be released in the first half of 2022.

Although Facebook has rebranded itself as Meta and claims to invest more effort into the metaverse than any other company in the world, Microsoft's new Mesh feature is a significant step forward for metaverse enthusiasts.

Katie Kelly, Chief Product Manager of Microsoft Mesh, believes, "We can animate that virtual avatar based on your voice prompts, so it really feels present and feels like it's right there with you. By the middle of next year, you'll be able to enter an immersive space and collaborate using Microsoft's tools."

"In the metaverse, you can do almost anything you can imagine—gather with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create, just like a hologram of the real world."

Additionally, Microsoft CEO Nadella stated in an interview with Bloomberg Television that the company's gaming device Xbox will "absolutely" focus on integrating the metaverse into the games on their devices.

"You can definitely expect us to do things in the gaming space; if you think of Halo as a game, then it is a metaverse. Microsoft is a metaverse, and Halo is too. In a sense, while they are 2D today, the question is whether you can bring it into a full 3D world, and we are doing that," he added.