if you are worried metaverse All will be fun and games, don’t be afraid: Microsoft Corp. is taking its grip on the idea, and will have PowerPoint and Excel.
The company is adapting its signature software products to create a more corporate version of the Metaverse – a concept promoted by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg that promises to let users live, work and play in interconnected virtual worlds.
The first offering, a version of Microsoft’s Teams chat and conferencing program that includes digital avatars, is currently in testing and will be available in the first half of 2022. Customers will be able to share Office files and features like Powerpoint Deck. Virtual World.
“This pandemic has made business use cases more mainstream, even though sometimes consumer goods seem like science fiction,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in an interview on Bloomberg television. Nadella himself uses technology to travel COVID-19 He wards at a UK hospital, Toyota’s manufacturing plant and even the International Space Station.
The new team features, unveiled Tuesday at the company’s Ignite conference, will let businesses create immersive spaces where workers can meet. The technology uses Microsoft software announced earlier this year called Mesh that enables augmented reality and virtual reality experiences in a variety of glasses, including Microsoft’s own HoloLens. Customers who lack a device capable of displaying 3D images can experience content and avatars in 2D.
Public perception of the Metaverse – as a futuristic world where plug-in people recreate their entire lives online – is still a way off. But commercial uses are now starting to become available, Nadella said.
Accenture used Microsoft software to create a “digital twin” of its headquarters to drive orientation for new employees during the pandemic. Microsoft Vice President Jared Spataro said the consulting firm has run more than 100 events that have reached more than 10,000 employees.
Anheuser-Busch InBev created copies of its brewing operations and supply chain that are synchronized with actual facilities and based on up-to-date information. The system lets brewers adjust to changing conditions and helps operators keep packaging machines running. Microsoft wants to sell more cloud software that lets customers ranging from retailers to manufacturers do the same.
“For example, you can experience a Best Buy store in the Metaverse” and check out the displays and equipment, Spataro said. “When you think of a website today, it doesn’t tie very well to the physicality we experience.”
To this end, Microsoft on Tuesday also unveiled a product called Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces. It will let people move and interact within retail and factory locations.
While Microsoft is leading the way with corporate applications for the metaverse, it expects its Xbox gaming platform to participate in the future, Nadella said.
“You can totally expect us to work in gaming,” he said, “if you take Halo as a game, it’s a metaverse. Minecraft is a metaverse, and so is flight sim. In some sense, they are 2D today, but the question is, can you now take it to a full 3D world, and that’s why we plan to do that in full swing.”
Microsoft’s Metaverse app will work with Meta Platforms Inc., formerly Facebook-made Oculus Googles. But it’s not yet clear how the metaverse’s perspectives from different companies will be able to connect. If, say, Nadella and Zuckerberg wanted to meet in the Metaverse, would they have to choose Microsoft’s Teams or Meta’s Horizon Workroom?
Microsoft is focused on practical applications of the metaverse — where the benefits are clear, Nadella said. And it will help people get used to the idea that some critics call scary.
“There is nothing scary about visiting a COVID ward remotely for a doctor to be able to help out his patients, or to be able to remotely assist in a manufacturing line in times of Covid crisis. , when that construction line needs to be fixed by one. Engineers working from home,” he said.
Azure OpenAI, a cloud-based service that lets customers—by invitation only—use the system’s powerful artificial intelligence model
New team features for working and chatting with users and groups outside a particular corporate network
Loop, a new application that operates in different programs to aggregate files, links, and data from other apps into a single workspace.
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