Latin America. Microsoft Mesh is a new mixed reality platform, powered by Azure, that allows people in different physical locations to join collaborative and shared holographic experiences on many types of devices.
"This has been the dream of mixed reality, the idea from the beginning," said Alex Kipman, a technical associate at Microsoft. "In fact, you can 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 they're not physically together."
Microsoft Mesh will enable geographically distributed teams to have more collaborative meetings, conduct virtual design sessions, attend others, learn together, and conduct virtual social meetings. Initially, people will be able to express themselves as avatars in these shared virtual experiences and, over time, use holoportation to project themselves as their most realistic and most photorealistic selves, the company said.
The new platform is the result of years of research and development by Microsoft in areas ranging from hand and eye tracking, and the development of HoloLens to create persistent holograms and artificial intelligence models that can create expressive avatars.
Built on Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform, Microsoft Mesh also benefits from Azure's enterprise-grade security and privacy features, as well as its vast computing, data, AI, and mixed reality services.
"Increasingly, we're building value in our intelligent cloud, which is Azure," Kipman said. "In these collaborative experiences, the content is not inside my device or within my app. The holographic content is in the cloud, and I just need the special lenses that allow me to see it."
With Microsoft Mesh-enabled applications, designers or engineers working with physical 3D models, from bicycles to high-end furniture, jet engines and new sports stadiums, could appear as themselves in a shared virtual space to collaborate and iterate on holographic models, no matter their physical location.
The Microsoft Mesh platform will offer developers, in the coming months, a full suite of AI-powered tools for avatars, session management, spatial processing, synchronization across multiple users and holoportation to build collaborative solutions in mixed reality, the company said.
Although users will have the richest experiences in mixed or virtual reality, Microsoft Mesh's open standards will give developers the freedom to build solutions that work on many devices: HoloLens 2, a range of virtual reality headbands, smartphones, tablets and PCs.
