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Microsoft's first attempts into the metaverse are Mesh for Teams and Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces.

Microsoft's first attempts into the metaverse are Mesh for Teams and Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces.


Mesh for Teams and Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces were revealed on Tuesday at Microsoft's Virtual Ignite conference, offering a look of the workplace metaverse.



Mesh for Teams combines Microsoft Mesh's mixed-reality capabilities, which allow users to join collaborative and shared holographic experiences from different physical locations, with Microsoft Teams, the company's online meeting, chat, and collaboration platform.



Dynamics 365 Connected Places, formerly Dynamics 365 Connected Store, allows a company to collect data about its physical spaces and analyse it using artificial intelligence. It might track foot traffic in a store, gauge interest in specific exhibitions, and cut checkout lines in real-time, for example. You can learn more about artificial intelligence by visiting bePakistani.



"The metaverse enables shared experiences across both the real and digital worlds," Microsoft's Corporate Vice President for Communications Frank X. Shaw said in a business blog.



"As organisations accelerate their digital changes, the metaverse may let individuals meet in a digital context, make meetings more comfortable through the use of avatars, and facilitate creative collaboration from around the world," he said.


In the office, there are some headwinds.


Following Facebook's announcement of a name change to Meta, Microsoft has released two new metaverse apps, showing that it sees extending the metaverse as crucial to its long-term success.


"It's a significant topic," said Bob O'Donnell, founder and chief analyst of Technalysis Research, a Foster City, Calif.-based technology market research and consulting firm. "Microsoft took advantage of the attention that Meta-the-company has been receiving."


He told TechNewsWorld, "The irony is that all of this is happening just as people are returning to work." "In that situation, demand for certain of these products will be lower than it appears currently."


"People will find that returning to the office alleviates some of the issues that this technology aims to address," he said.


"There is little doubt," O'Donnell said, "that individuals will continue to seek hybrid solutions." People who work from home or in a hybrid environment will want better collaboration tools. That is the agreement Microsoft has reached."


Construction is now underway.


According to O'Donnell, Microsoft is indicating that multiple forms of metaverses will exist through programmes like Mesh for Teams and Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces. "It's implying that you can do a lot more practical and business-focused things than simply these zany kinds of consumer applications," he explained.


These technologies, according to Rob Enderle, president and chief analyst of the Enderle Group, an advisory services firm in Bend, Oregon, give us a limited view of the metaverse.


"This begins to give us an early idea of a small fraction of what the metaverse will be able to do," he told TechNewsWorld."


However, this is equivalent to giving a book a rating after just reading one chapter in its entirety.


"We'll have to wait until the majority of the metaverse is finished, which could take years, to have a complete picture of it."



Although the metaverse as a fully realised concept is still years away, Michael Inouye, a principal analyst at ABI Research, believes that as that future approaches, a platform like Mesh for Teams can assist advance the cause in a variety of ways.


"Digital assets and virtual commodities, for example, will play a greater role in how people express themselves and represent their digital personas and places of work," he told TechNewsWorld.


"We might take the rise in non-fungible tokens [NFTs] as an early indicator — alongside virtual goods and cosmetics in games — that the marketplace is beginning to view virtual commodities on par with physical and real things," he said.


"This is why many people relate the metaverse to the internet," he explained. "It will be the common thread that connects what are currently disparate experiences and apps."



It's vital to be device agnostic.


Mesh for Teams is a very early, very rudimentary form of the coming metaverse, according to Darin Stewart, a research vice president at Gartner.


"The most obvious function portrayed," he told TechNewsWorld, "is allowing individuals to engage in a semi-immersive environment," but "device independence is more significant."

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