[Microsoft has announced new features that move us closer to its vision for the much-discussed concept of a metaverse; the story below from The Verge offers some of the details and is followed by excerpts of other coverage that highlight presence-related aspects of the news. –Matthew]
Microsoft Teams enters the metaverse race with 3D avatars and immersive meetings
Microsoft and Meta are on a collision course for metaverse competition
By Tom Warren
November 2, 2021
Microsoft is entering the race to build a metaverse inside Teams, just days after Facebook rebranded to Meta in a push to build virtual spaces for both consumers and businesses. Microsoft is bringing Mesh, a collaborative platform for virtual experiences, directly into Microsoft Teams next year. It’s part of a big effort to combine the company’s mixed reality and HoloLens work with meetings and video calls that anyone can participate in thanks to animated avatars.
With today’s announcement, Microsoft and Meta seem to be on a collision course to compete heavily in the metaverse, particularly for the future of work.
Microsoft Mesh always felt like the future of Microsoft Teams meetings, and now it’s starting to come to life in the first half of 2022. Microsoft is building on efforts like Together Mode and other experiments for making meetings more interactive, after months of people working from home and adjusting to hybrid work.
“We got hit by meeting fatigue in the virtual world,” explains Nicole Herskowitz, general manager for Microsoft Teams, in an interview with The Verge. “After 30 or 40 minutes max in a meeting, it was very hard to stay engaged and focused.” That initial meeting fatigue led to Together Mode, and now Microsoft hopes Mesh will further help reduce the cognitive overload of having to be on video calls all day long.
Microsoft Teams will get new 3D avatars in a push toward a metaverse environment, and you won’t need to put a VR headset on to use them. These avatars can literally represent you both in 2D and 3D meetings, so you can choose to have an animated version of yourself if you’re not feeling like turning your webcam on.
“It’s not binary, so I can choose how I want to show up, whether it’s video or an avatar, and there’s a variety of customized options to choose how you want to be present in a meeting,” says Katie Kelly, principal product manager for Microsoft Mesh, in an interview with The Verge. “We are able to interpret your vocal cues to animate that avatar, so it does feel present and it does feel like it’s there with you.”
Microsoft will use AI to listen to your voice and then animate your avatar. If you switch to a more immersive 3D meeting, then these animations will also include raising your avatar’s hands when you hit the raise hand option or animate emoji around your avatar.
The immersive spaces are really where Microsoft sees this Mesh integration as being the most useful, particularly in its efforts to build a metaverse for businesses. Microsoft envisions virtual spaces inside Teams where people can network and socialize with games or even use Microsoft apps to collaborate on projects.
These virtual environments will obviously work best with a VR or AR headset, but they’ll be open to anyone across multiple devices thanks to the animated avatar work. “I think the thing that really separates how Microsoft is approaching metaverse and our own experiences is starting with the human experience, so the feeling of presence, talking to somebody, making eye contact, and reactions are going to be important,” explains Kelly.
Microsoft is even building in translation and transcription support, so you might be able to meet in a virtual Teams space with a co-worker from across the world with fewer language barriers.
The promise is that Microsoft Teams will be able to start to use these virtual spaces and avatars in the first half of 2022. “The goal is that by the first half of next year, you’ll be able to go into an immersive space and then be able to collaborate and use Microsoft’s tools,” says Kelly.
Businesses will be able to build their own virtual spaces, or metaverses, inside Teams. That’s something that Accenture has been experimenting with after creating its own virtual campus for employees before the pandemic. This virtual space soon became useful, as the company has used it to onboard new hires during the pandemic.
Microsoft’s push for a metaverse inside Teams comes just days after Facebook rebranded to Meta as its company name. Meta is working on very similar concepts to Microsoft, led by the idea of a digital avatar that represents you in virtual spaces. Meta’s Reality Labs division has been building consumer hardware and software, including the Quest VR headset, and teased its own vision of remote work using augmented and virtual reality last year.
Microsoft and Meta will clearly compete heavily in the metaverse era. It’s an area Microsoft has spent years investing in, with its HoloLens work and its acquisition of AltspaceVR. Microsoft and Meta aren’t alone, though. Many companies have started using platforms like Spatial to offer virtual spaces for events, meetings, and networking opportunities.
Meta has billions of daily users across Facebook and Instagram to leverage for its metaverse ambitions, and Microsoft has the millions of daily Teams users and integration into Office to try to make the metaverse a reality for businesses. The metaverse battle for your digital avatars is only just beginning.
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[From Engadget]
Microsoft’s Mesh for Teams brings mixed reality to work
It’ll add 3D avatars and environments into Teams.
By D. Hardawar
November 2, 2021
Alex Kipman, the Microsoft technical fellow who spearheaded the Kinect and HoloLens, originally pitched Mesh as a way for first-line workers to remotely collaborate on complex 3D models. Mesh for Teams boils that idea down for the typical knowledge worker, the sort of person who spends most of their day at a desk hopping between meetings, emails and office apps. It may not seem as exciting as Meta’s pitch for a metaverse filled with multiplayer games and virtual events, but for many people, it’s a far more useful way of thinking of a more connected internet.
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[From Fast Company]
Facebook wants to build a metaverse. Microsoft is creating something even more ambitious
Rather than ruling one metaverse, Microsoft wants its Mesh platform to be the glue that holds a multiverse of many worlds together.
By Mark Wilson
November 2, 2021
WHY USE AN AVATAR AT ALL?
Microsoft’s anchoring philosophy with Mesh is that you can come, not just as you are, but as you want to be. As mentioned earlier, you will be able to dial in to Teams with your webcam or phone as you could before. But you can also opt to appear as a cartoon avatar of your own design.
If you are on an audio-only call, Microsoft uses software to translate your spoken words into proper mouth shapes. This speech also drives accompanying gestures and expressions. If you have a webcam available, Microsoft can use that data to map these expressions with greater accuracy.
My first question to Microsoft’s leaders was, why do we keep seeing cartoon character avatars in virtual spaces? Are they useful? Or are they a smiley veneer that’s draped over real communication?
As it turns out, the cartoons serve several important functions—especially for those of us who prefer not to be on camera all day.
“Today people face a very binary choice as they join a digital meeting. They have to choose if they have their cam on or cam off,” says Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of Microsoft 365 and Teams. “Cam on means you’re front and center, people see your every move. Camera off means you emit almost no social cues, and it’s hard to project a feeling of being engaged in the meeting.”
[Image: Microsoft]Indeed, we’ve all wondered if that colleague who is muted with the video off is really in the meeting at all. Microsoft’s own human-factors lab has tested these extremes. They’ve strapped EEGs to people’s heads and seen them get digitally exhausted by appearing on video. They’ve also found that when you have an avatar, 70% of other people in the meeting feel that person was present.
The choice of a cartoon avatar is simply the best option we have to present a 3D human body for the level of graphic technology we have today, Kipman says. Microsoft’s cartoony avatars will be able to project your own body language, mapping your movements through a webcam or other means.
The avatars appear sophisticated enough that they mimic facial expressions—and Microsoft doesn’t want to mess with those. “You need to [be able to] represent yourself in an authentic way,” says Kipman. “That’s inclusive of frowning and being pissed off. The point of agency is important. Because as a business and emotional construct, it’s important the avatar is representing you in the most authentic way possible.”
It’s also important because Microsoft hopes that you’ll take your Mesh avatar out of Teams, and out into the multiverse. The Mesh APIs accommodate for this possibility, and they balance both your own persistence of identity with the rules and regulations that might be built into any different metaverse you visit.
Kipman imagines that you (and your avatar) might attend a virtual concert on a Sunday night, and pick up a T-shirt. The next morning, your avatar should be able to go into work on Teams, in that T-shirt. Well, if it’s appropriate. Each individual metaverse can impose its own rules.
“If the Department of Defense (DoD) metaverse says ‘we don’t want Mickey Mouse T-shirts coming in, only uniforms’ . . . the way they handle data today, they can [ban] Mickey Mouse T-shirts in their metaverse,” says Kipman.
Perhaps a DoD dress code doesn’t seem so notable at first glance, but Kipman explains that a PG-rated metaverse could establish rules and norms around certain avatar choices, ensuring there are safe spaces for families as well as adults—a challenge which the internet has failed pretty spectacularly at today. Of course, Mesh for Teams is still in the works, and many of its features have barely been detailed. But it’s clear that Microsoft is trying to strike a balance between earnest self-expression and reasonable regulation. I’m personally not entirely sold on augmented reality meetings. But a more civil internet sounds like utopia to me.
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[From Wired]
These Companies Are Already Living in Zuckerberg’s Metaverse
The Meta dream envisages whole companies operating in a virtual world. Many made the switch years ago—with mixed results.
By Megan Carnegie
November 2, 2021
Facebook’s Metaverse, or Meta’s metaverse, isn’t just being touted as a better version of the internet—it’s being hailed as a better version of reality. We will, apparently, “socialize, learn, collaborate, and play” in an interconnected 3D virtual space that Facebook cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg describes as an “embodied internet.” This space, Zuckerberg claims, won’t be created by one single company, but rather by a network of creators and developers. First problem: 91 percent of software developers are male. Second problem: You’ve been living in a version of metaverse for years—and, having taken over video games, it’s now coming for the world of work.
Companies big and small have been testing avatar-based platforms for remote and hybrid working since Covid-19 lockdowns began. Using Oculus VR headsets, Facebook’s Horizon Workrooms envisages a near future in which people meet virtually in a soulless, floaty virtual world. Microsoft’s Mesh for Hololens 2 hopes to facilitate similarly corporate mixed reality meetups, and Canadian ecommerce platform Shopify just launched its browser-based game Shopify Party, in which employees appear as their chosen avatars to spice up one-to-ones, icebreakers, standups, and other team events.
Many have already pointed out how boring the Zuckerverse looks. Most of us have already been living in that future, be it through the organized fun of workplace social apps or through video games like Fortnite. And while the video game metaverse offers plenty of room for imagination and connection, the corporate metaverse risks repeating and potentially magnifying the flaws of the real world.
Whether a company adopts certain aspects of the corporate metaverse, or uses it for every aspect of remote work, there’s nothing to stop unconscious biases from seeping in. “It’s easy for companies to just invest in the technology, but businesses need to understand the psychology driving people to use it,” says Roshni Raveendhran, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. “Can employees thrive within that sort of universe? What would allow them to thrive?”
[…]
If—and it’s a big if—the workforce heads into some kind of metaverse, Meta-owned or otherwise, then the rules and flaws of these virtual worlds will matter more and more. “At the end of the day, all of us are humans behind these avatars,” says Raveendhran. “We need to be conscious of our biases translating and understand the blows won’t be any lighter, just because it’s in the virtual world.”
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